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Delaying Justice? The ICC’s war crimes investigation in limbo over who represents Afghanistan

August 1, 2022

Ehsan Qaane

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Judges at the International Criminal Court (ICC) have still not made a decision to authorise, or not, the resumption of the court’s war crimes investigation in Afghanistan, ten months after the ICC Prosecutor urged them to expedite their approval. It means that, 16 years after the ICC began to look into Afghanistan, it has still yet to move beyond the preliminary examination stage. The judges appear to be deliberating over who now represents Afghanistan in order to decide whether a deferral request from the previous government still has standing. Since August 2021, Afghanistan has been ruled by the de facto, internationally unrecognised Islamic Emirate, while being represented abroad by diplomats appointed by the fallen regime of the Islamic Republic. AAN’s Ehsan Qaane explores the conundrum of representation that is currently delaying the court, but which also has wider reverberations for the issue of government recognition.

The flag of the fallen Islamic Republic of Afghanistan among the flags of all the state parties at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Photo: Ehsan Qaane, taken in March 2016, but an ICC spokesperson said, it still hangs there.The flag of the fallen Islamic Republic of Afghanistan among the flags of all the state parties at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Photo taken by Ehsan Qaane in March 2016, but, an ICC spokesperson said, it hangs there still.

Flashback

The judges of the Pre-Trial Chamber play an important role in the first phase of judicial proceedings at the International Criminal Court, including whether to authorise requests by ICC Prosecutors to proceed with investigations. In April 2019, the judges of the Pre-Trail Chamber (hereafter, ‘the judges’) turned down a request, made in 2017 by the previous prosecutor, to investigate alleged war crimes committed in Afghanistan or in the context of the Afghan conflict: she had named the Taleban, the Haqqani network, the United States military and CIA, and the then government’s security forces.[1] The Appeals Chamber reversed that decision in March 2020. However, before an investigation could begin, it was suspended by a deferral request from President Ashraf Ghani government that same month and submitted it under article 18(2) of the Rome Statute.

Ghani’s administration argued that the court’s intervention was not required because there were active domestic investigations into some of the alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity that the ICC was considering. One of the court’s fundamental principles, as defined in the ICC’s core legal texts, is the principle of “complementarity,” which holds that primary jurisdiction lies with the state on whose territory the alleged crimes were perpetrated. To support its request, the Afghan government submitted thousands of pages of information in Dari and Pashto relating to around 180 cases it claimed were being investigated. Our understanding was that the request, and particularly its heavy load of translation, was aimed at slowing down the court’s work and that it had little real merit – see AAN’s report on Appeals Chamber’s decision here and on Afghanistan’s deferral request here and here.

Karim Khan, the ICC Chief Prosecutor, was still considering Kabul’s deferral request when the Ghani government was forcibly ejected from power by the Taleban in August 2021. In September 2021, about a month after the fall of the Ghani government, he said that his team had not reached “a final determination” on whether to accept the supporting information as reasonable evidence of genuine domestic prosecutions or not. According to him, “further clarifications were still required for a relatively large proportion” of the information provided by the Afghan state.[2]

Nevertheless, on 27 September 2021, he requested that the judges accept an expedited decision to reopen the court’s investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan “notwithstanding the Deferral Request.” Khan explained that it was due to “the significant change of material circumstances” since August 2021, the laws and policies of the fallen regime, including the mechanisms Afghanistan had established to prosecute war crimes domestically, were no longer in place. He argued that neither the Taleban, as the de facto rulers of the country, nor those who represent Afghanistan abroad were “any longer able” to prosecute the war atrocities which come under the court’s scope of investigation. These facts, he said, “are not reasonably subjected to dispute.” (See AAN’s 2021 report about his request here).

Khan requested the judges to rule  “[o]n basis of an expedited procedure,” perhaps due to concerns about destruction of evidence by the Taleban, whose leaders would be one of the primary suspects in the investigation. Khan’s sense of urgency may also have been motivated by disquiet about the ongoing commission of war crimes in the country; on summary executions after August 2021, see Human Rights Watch reports here and here, Amnesty International reports here and here, on an attack on the Sikh community in Kabul, see a Radio Azadi report here and on attacks on Hazaras and Shias, see AAN’s report here.

Khan’s request was controversial. He proposed that because of the “the limited resources available” to his office, he would only to investigate the alleged war crimes of the Taleban and ISKP. By implication, this would mean a deprioritisation of the crimes attributed to the US military and CIA and the former government’s security forces. His predecessor, it should be noted, had concluded that there were reasonable grounds that the United States military and CIA had “resorted to techniques amounting to the commission of the war crimes of torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, and rape” and the Republic’s national security forces, …the war crimes of torture and cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity pursuant to article, and sexual violence (quotes from her 2016 Preliminary Examination Report; AAN analysis here).

Khan’s request to deprioritise the alleged war crimes of the former government and especially of the US military and CIA was a bombshell to victims and human rights advocates alike. To them, AAN reported, it looked like he was creating a “hierarchy of victims.” Many hoped the judges would revert to authorising the wider investigation. Instead, there have been ten months of waiting with, as yet, no decision. The hold-up stems from the old government’s request to defer the investigation.

Since the Prosecutor’s request, there were ten months of back and forth by the judges as they sought to identify the competent Afghan authorities before ruling on the request. Then, on 22 July 2022, they ordered the Prosecutor to provide them “any material received from Afghanistan in support of the [Afghanistan] Deferral Request” and “an assessment of the Deferral Request, or any other relevant observations and information,” by 26 August 2022. The assessment should also include “evidence to substantiate [the Prosecutor’s] assertions, in particular as the lack of ongoing domestic proceedings or the inaction of the authorities currently represent Afghanistan.”

Rule 54(1) of the ICC Rules of Procedure and Evidence, one of the core legal texts of the court, obliges the judges to themselves examine the supportive information provided by the state requesting a deferral before deciding whether or not to reopen the deferred investigation. However, in the Afghanistan case, as the Prosecutor has argued, the laws, policies and mechanisms for domestic proceedings which were established by the former regime are no longer in place following the regime change in August. Therefore, he suggested that the judges could decide his request “notwithstanding” the supportive information provided by Ghani’s administration. Khan added in his request that he would share the supportive information if the judges asked for it.

The implications of the judges’ 22 July request are not yet clear, and this report will not dwell on the request. Instead it looks about the judges’ push to find out who Afghanistan’s ‘competent authorities’ now are, who represents the country before the court.  How they have gone about that task in the last ten months raises questions about whether they have strayed into political territory, but also highlights wider questions about the recognition or not of a government which comes to power in circumstances the countries of the world find problematic.

Afghanistan’s right to observe

For the judges to rule on Khan’s request to authorise an investigation, they need to be assured that the court has informed Afghanistan about its right to make what is called an observation on the Prosecutor’s request, in other words that the State Party has been given the opportunity to express its support or opposition to the request.[3] The problem for the ICC, however, is: ‘Who’ now is Afghanistan?

Since 15 August 2021, the Taleban have ruled Afghanistan as the de facto government, but without being internationally recognised by any state, while the diplomatic missions appointed by the fallen regime have continued to claim they represent the country abroad, including in the United Nations, and the Netherlands where the ICC is based.

The Afghanistan embassy in the Netherlands has been the diplomatic channel between Afghanistan and the ICC since a meaningful relationship between them was established in 2016 (for more on this relationship, read this AAN report). The court and embassy are both located in The Hague city of the Netherlands. As per an agreement with the old government and article 87(1) of the Rome Statute, this is the channel through which the court should deal with Kabul. So for example, the Prosecutor informed the embassy on 3 September 2021 of his intention to request the resumption of the investigation.

Perhaps fearing the issue of who represents Afghanistan could cause delays, Khan suggested in his request that the judges set a deadline for receiving an observation from Afghanistan. If Afghanistan does not file its observation within the deadline, Khan said, the judges should not “abstain from rendering a decision promptly.” Rather they should avoid unnecessary delays in the proceedings.

From the judges’ perspective, it is vital to establish who the competent Afghan authorities are. They explained this in a letter made on 8 October 2021 to the United Nations Secretary-General and the ICC Bureau of the Assembly of States Parties for “information on the identification of the authorities currently representing the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan by Monday 8 November 2021.” The Prosecutor’s request, the judge’s letter said, “cannot… be legally adjudicated without addressing the question of which entity actually constitutes the State authorities of Afghanistan since 15 August 2021.” They said this question is “central to the triggering of the procedure under article 18(2).” The judges built their argument on the court’s complementarity mandate, which means that if a state, as the primary jurisdiction holder, is domestically providing justice to victims, the ICC’s direct intervention is redundant. To implement the principle of complementarity “orderly, meaningfully and effectively,” it is essential, they argued “that there be no uncertainty as to the representation and competent authorities of the concerned State.” They said that “at the heart” of the Rome Statute is article 18, which among other things, gives a state the legal power to stop an ICC investigation if it can prove its ability and willingness to deal with alleged crimes through the domestic courts.[4] Although the Prosecutor is satisfied that the Afghan authorities – whoever they might be – are not able or willing to try the alleged crimes themselves and so wants the judges to dismiss Ghani’s deferral request, the judges are apparently not yet convinced, or at least want to be clear who the competent authorities are before making a decision.

The judges’ letter to show that they are not convinced that the diplomats appointed by the former regime can truly represent Afghanistan before the court. However, they themselves cannot contact the Taleban authorities directly, as that would imply recognition. The judges also said in the same 8 October letter, they believe the decision of who represents a state is of a “political nature” and a matter of “constitutional and international law,” beyond the mandate of themselves, the Prosecutor, or “any organ of the Court’s purview.”

The two institutions did respond, but were of little help. The Bureau of the ICC Assembly of States Parties said, on 26 October 2021, that “due to its nature and functions, it [the Bureau] does not hold the type of information that is requested.” The UN Secretary General, meanwhile, told the judges on 18 October 2021, that the decision of government recognition was not his to make, but was “a matter for individual Member States.” He noted that the UN “General Assembly has not taken any [new] decision on the representation of Afghanistan.” Since then, a Taleban request for recognition from the UN was rejected by the UN Credential Committee, on 1 December 2021. Soon after, on 6 December 2021, the General Assembly agreed to keep the Republic’s Permanent Representative in office, with no end date, thereby ruling out any change on who represents Afghanistan to the UN for now. That means that Afghanistan is still represented by the Permanent Mission of Afghanistan to the UN which was introduced by the fallen Republic.

Nevertheless, the judges pushed on with trying to clarify what for them appears still to be a pressing issue. On 24 February 2022, they issued an invitation for Afghanistan to submit an observation on the Prosecutor’s request. The judges outlined their problem in the letter. Changes of government, they say, “have no impact on the continuity of States” and do not stop the business of the court. While “no state has formally recognised the group which ousted the government of Ashraf Ghani,” as they pointed out, numerous states, the UN and others have held talks and “have officially referred to the group that has seized power as the ‘Afghanistan de facto authorities’ or the ‘de facto government’ of Afghanistan, therefore regarding members of that group as the interlocutors of Afghanistan.” The judges stress that they are seeking observations on the request to investigate so as to “ensure the continuity of judicial proceedings in the most rigorous way.” For these reasons, the judges say:

…the Chamber invites pursuant to rule 55(2) of the Rules Afghanistan to provide observations on the Application for resumption of the investigation, no later than Friday 25 March 2022. Accordingly, the Chamber orders the Registrar to communicate the present order to the authorities currently representing Afghanistan. 

The judges appear to have thrown the ball to the ICC’s Registrar, who is the head of the Registry, which manages all the administrative functions of the ICC to contact the relevant authorities. In the same letter, the judge also “invites the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to provide observations.” If the judges considered them one and the same, it would not have made two requests.

The Afghan ambassador to the Netherlands, Asif Rahimi, did respond privately to the judges, saying that due to “the security and political developments in Afghanistan” in August 2021, he was “unable to provide any further observations or submissions.” This was directly quoted in a confidential ICC report, which was mistakenly uploaded onto the ICC website as a public document for a few days (AAN read the report before it was removed and later received a copy from someone who had downloaded it).

On 7 April 2022, the judges wrote a second request, this time to the UN Secretary-General and to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), asking them to send on their invitation to submit observations to the “authorities currently representing the Islamic  Republic of Afghanistan.” They also “reiterate[d] the invitation to the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to provide observations on the Prosecutor’s Application for resumption of the investigation.” Again there was a strange, double request, both directly to the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and to the UN to say who was now representing the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, all at the same time that the already-agreed channel of communication to Afghanistan, the ambassador, is co-located with the court in The Hague.

Possibly the judges were hoping that someone other than Republic-era Afghan ambassador to the Netherlands, or his counterpart at the UN would respond. This was not to be. On 4 May 2022, the UN Secretary-General forwarded the judges’ invitation to Afghanistan’s Permanent Representative to the UN, who, in an interview with AAN on 20 May 2022 said he had sent his response to the court back through the UN.[5] He had made four points to the judges:

  • The Afghanistan embassy in the Netherlands remains Afghanistan’s focal point on matters related to the ICC and Afghanistan;
  • On 15 August 2021, the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan collapsed and the Taleban took power by force;
  • Taleban rule is neither legitimate nor internationally recognised; and
  • The judges should act according to the provisions of the Rome Statute and the Court’s Rules of Procedures and Evidence.

Meanwhile, the Taleban have initiated no communication with the court. This is even though, as well as the invitation for ‘Afghanistan’ to make observations being published on the ICC website, the acting Taleban Foreign Minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, was informed, unofficially by the Afghan ambassador to the Netherlands of the Prosecutor’s request to investigate and of the judges’ 24 February 2022 letter. This is according to a source at the embassy who spoke to the author in September 2021.

The conundrum of who represents Afghanistan

That the judges wish to be in contact with the competent and rightful authorities of Afghanistan is entirely appropriate. It is also reasonable for them to take the position that it is not in their mandate to decide who represents Afghanistan. However, by disregarding the Afghanistan embassy in the Netherlands as the agreed diplomatic channel between the court and Afghanistan, the judges seem to have made a political determination which may be outside their purview and negate the guidelines of article 87(1) of the Rome Statute which says requests should be “transmitted through the diplomatic channel or any other appropriate channel as may be designated by each State Party.”

The Afghan ambassador to the Netherlands appears to have interpreted the judges’ communications as an indication that the court regards the Taleban as a competent authority, according to an AAN source in the embassy. It was on this basis that he shared the judges’ invitation with the acting Taleban foreign minister through unofficial communication channels.[6]This communication was discovered by Afghan human rights defenders who asked to stay anonymous for security reasons. They pressured the ambassador to cease communications with the Taleban and instead inform the judges that Afghanistan has no observations to offer on the Prosecutor’s request. As a result, the ambassador wrote to the judges and advised them that he could not provide any observations or submissions in the current circumstances, back to Afghan human rights defenders (communication was shared in a WhatsApp group which the author is a member of). Yet, as was detailed earlier in this report, even after the Afghan ambassador’s reply, the judges sent out their second invitation for observations, on 7 April.

The Prosecutor and the Registrar’s position

In contrast to the judges, the ICC Prosecutor and Registrar both believe the Afghan embassy in the Netherlands is the only appropriate diplomatic channel. In his September request, Khan twice mentioned that he had notified the Afghanistan embassy in the Netherlands about his intention to file the request for a resumption of the court’s Afghanistan investigation per rule 54(2) of the Rules of Procedure and Evidence.[7] A source at the embassy, on condition of anonymity, confirmed the receipt of this communication.

The Prosecutor has, in his September 2021 request, acknowledged that the current ambiguities related to the legal standing of a de facto, unrecognised government mean he “cannot be assured of [his] practical ability to confer with the State authorities in question – for example, due to legal impediments in recognising the credentials of such authorities.” While this highlights the difficulties in direct communications with the Taleban, it also does not necessarily preclude the Taleban from submitting an observation. On another occasion, Khan noted that through public invitation on the ICC website and also the ICC Registry “[t]he Chamber has taken the requisite steps to alert the competent Afghan authorities […], and has provided with sufficient time to provide their observations.” By this, he could suggest that who see themselves as entitled to submit observation to the court (a possible reference to the de facto Taleban administration) were able to see the court’s first invitation on its website and could approach the court if they wished.

Khan may have suggested a way through the impasse the judges appear to have created for themselves when he advised avoiding attempts “to define the de jure and/or de facto authorities in Afghanistan at the present time.” They could instead leave it to the Taleban and the diplomats representing the former regime to decide whether or not to submit observations within an agreed period. This position seems reasonable.

The court’s Registrar has taken the same stance as Khan. On 25 March 2022, he reported to the judges, in confidence, that he had transferred the judges’ 24 February request to the Afghan embassy in The Hague “by way of note verbale,” an unsigned diplomatic note (the confidential report was mistakenly published on the ICC website. AAN has a copy of it). The Registrar added his communication was pursuant to article 87 (1) of the Rome Statute, which states that communication between the court and states should happen through diplomatic channels. The Registrar asserted that “the [Afghanistan] authorities did not designate any other appropriate channel following the ratification of the Statute.”

International law and government recognition

International law says that a government change does not affect a recognised state’s legal status. The ICC judges are certainly aware of this principle, as they quote it in their 8 October 2021 request for advice from the UN and ICC Bureau of Assembly of States Parties’ as to who are now the competent Afghan authorities. Recognition of a new state is different from recognition of a new government. There are a few theoretical provisions for the recognition of a new state in international law, for example, the 1933 Montevideo Convention, but there are no provisions for the recognition of a new government. While the latter is more a political matter than a legal one, it does, nevertheless, have many legal implications, including but not limited to the representation of the state internationally.

Changes in government are common and recognising a new government only becomes an issue if that government comes to power unconstitutionally, especially if it is violent, for example, through a coup d’état, revolution or, in Afghanistan’s case, seizure of power by an armed opposition group. In this case, whether or not to recognise the new de facto authorities is a matter for individual states; the UN itself has no power to decide on this matter, as highlighted in the UN Secretary-General’s first reply to the ICC judges. However, member states of the UN could use the UN Credentials Committee to impose a joint decision on a matter of international recognition, as they have done with the Taleban.

International law has competing doctrines regarding the recognition of unconstitutionally established governments. The Tobar doctrine (later known as the Wilsonian Policy) was articulated at the beginning of the 20th century by Carlos Tobar, Ecuador’s then Minister of Foreign Affairs. It holds that governments that have taken power unconstitutionally should not be granted recognition. Similarly, the Stimson doctrine posits that a territory cannot be acquired purely by aggression. This was articulated by then US Secretary of State Henry L Stimson in response to the Japanese occupation of the Chinese territory of Manchuria in 1931. In contrast, the Estrada doctrine, formulated by Genaro Estrada, Mexico’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs in the 1930s, asserts that recognition of a new government should be based on its de facto existence, rather than on other states’ assessment of its legitimacy. This policy is based on the principle of non-intervention and self-determination, in other words, it is not a matter for other states to decide who rules  a sovereign state.

In relation to the Taleban government, members of the UN have followed the Tobar or Stimson doctrines. No state has recognised the Taleban de facto government, which came to power by force after an almost 20-year-long insurgency. Instead, as in UN Resolution 2596, which extended UNAMA’s mandate, the UN Security Council expresses itself in ways that look like it has pre-conditions for the Taleban to fulfil to gain recognised. They are to do with establishing an “inclusive and representative government,” with “full, equal and meaningful participation of women,” upholding “human rights, including for women, children and minorities” and ensuring that Afghan territory is not “used to threaten or attack any country, to plan or finance terrorist acts, or to shelter and train terrorists.”

So far, Taleban policy and practice has opposed such demands promising – shuttering girls’ high schools, for example, and imposing other severe restrictions on the rights of Afghan citizens, particularly women (read AAN’s reports on Taleban restrictions on girls’ education here on freedom of speech here, rules on women’s clothing hereand our analysis of UNAMA’s report on human rights here). Additionally, their supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada’s speech to ulema in Kabul on 1 July 2022 told foreigners not to interfere in Afghanistan’s internal affairs.

Victims’ views: “Justice delayed is justice denied”

Always, even in a report about the machinations of the ICC and the complexities of international law, it is important to remember that, fundamentally, this is always about justice. The judges’ ten month search for the ‘competent authorities’ in Afghanistan represents yet another delay for victims. Set against that, in the meantime, the ICC Registry has ended a five-month consultation to collect the views and concerns of victims on the possible resumption of the court’s Afghanistan investigation. This was the second time the court had consulted victims, and is a necessary stage for the judges to give the go-ahead for an investigation or reject if they are not supportive. The first consultation, which concluded in January 2018 as the ICC Registry reported, found almost universal support from more than 6,000 victims for an investigation (see AAN’s report on the first consultation here).

According to the Registrar’s final report on the second consultation, which was submitted to the judges on 24 April 2022, 11,150 individual victims and 130 families shared their views in 16 representation forms, one from an individual, the rest made collectively. All demanded that the court authorises an investigation. The report quoted victims saying variously that “the ICC is the only court of justice” for Afghan war victims, and the investigation should be “immediately… approved,” “resumed” and “continued.” One victim said: “For many victims of gross crimes against humanity, attaining justice” was the “only way to relieve a small percent of the pain and trauma” they felt. Another submission reminded the court that “justice delayed is justice denied.”

Victims of war crimes allegedly committed on Afghan soil or in Poland, Lithuania and Poland in relation to the Afghan conflict have indeed been waiting a long, long time for the court to act. Afghanistan was in the preliminary examination phase from 2006 to 2017, the period when the Prosecutor reviews whether there are grounds for an investigation, the second longest in the court’s history, after Columbia. The Office of the Prosecutor finally sought authorisation to open an investigation in 2017. There was then a wait of two years while the judges of the Pre-Trial Chamber weighing up her request. In the end, in 2019, they rejected it, arguing that conditions at the time limited the prospects for a successful investigation and prosecution. That decision was overturned, on appeal, in 2020. Then, before an investigation could really get going, it was halted by the Ghani administration filing the deferral request.

Now, the ICC Prosecutor has made it clear he wants to resume an investigation, albeit only into the Taleban and ISKP. Yet, even reaching a decision on that has taken the judges ten months, and counting. They have already shown themselves reluctant to allow this investigation – in their original rejection of the previous Prosecutor’s 2017 request for one. Possibly, what we are seeing now is more foot-dragging, if their reservations remain.

Edited by Jelena Bjelica, Rachel Reid, Roxanna Shapour and Kate Clark

References

References
↑1 Based on the previous prosecutor’s preliminary examination, an investigation could cover the alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Taleban and its affiliated group, the Haqqani network, the US military and CIA, as well as the Afghan National Security Forces of the Republic regime since 1 May 2003 in Afghanistan and since 1 July 2002 for alleged crimes that took place in Poland, Lithuania and Romania where the CIA allegedly rendered men detained on Afghan soil (the dates are when the Rome Statute came into force). Since then, the Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISKP) has also come into the purview of the prosecutor.
↑2 According to Khan’s September 2021 request: “The information provided in support of the Deferral Request established that, prior to 15 August 2021, the Afghan authorities had conducted domestic proceedings with regard to certain alleged crimes within the scope of the Deferral Request. However, while the Afghan authorities had submitted some information concerning a significant number of cases, the level of detail in that information varied widely to the extent that further clarifications were still required for a relatively large proportion. Likewise, for a number of cases, the proceedings were not sufficiently advance to form a view of their scope or likely impact.”
↑3 Rule 55(2) of the ICC Rules of Procedure and Evidence, one of the court’s core legal texts, obliges the judges to examine the ICC Prosecutor’s request for resumption of an investigation pursuant to article 18(2) of the Rome Statute and any observations submitted by a state that requested a deferral under the same article. Article 18(2) reads as follows: 

Within one month of receipt of that notification [related to Afghanistan, notification of initiation of an investigation pursuant to article 15 of the Rome Statute], a State may inform the Court that its investigating or has investigated its nationals or others within its jurisdiction with respect to criminal acts which may constitute crimes referred to in article 5 [of the Rome Statute] and which relate to the information provided in the notification to States. At the request of that State, the Prosecutor shall defer to the State’s investigation of those persons unless the Pre-Trial Chamber, on the application of the Prosecutor, decides to authorize the investigation.

It means that a state (ie Afghanistan) has the right to request a deferral of an authorised investigation if it can prove its ability and willingness to prosecute the alleged crimes domestically itself. Upon the state’s request, the Prosecutor must defer the investigation unless the Prosecutor determines that the supporting information provided by the state cannot prove the state’s claim. In this case, the Prosecutor must request the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber to authorise the resumption of the investigation. Alleged crimes here refer to article 5 of the Rome Statute which lists war crimes, crimes against humanity, crime of aggression and crime of genocide.
↑4 Article 18(2) basically says that a state has the right to request the deferral of an authorised investigation of the court if it can prove its ability and willingness to itself prosecute the alleged crimes domestically. Upon the request of the state, the Prosecutor then has to defer the investigation unless he or she determines that the provided supportive information by the state cannot prove the state’s claim. In that case, the Prosecutor has to request the Pre-Trial Chamber of the ICC for authorisation to resume the investigation.
↑5 On 3 June 2022, a document posted to the ICC websiteby the ICC Registry said the court had received a letter from the UN without specifying whom the letter was from. This could possibly have been the Afghanistan Permanent Representative’s response to the second invitation or from the UN itself. The letter itself was “classified as confidential, due to the sensitive nature of the information contained therein, and as agreed with the United Nations,” said the ICC Registry.
↑6 In March 2022, AAN asked the ambassador about his communication with the Taleban acting minister for Foreign Affairs, but he gave no answer.
↑7 This rule says that the prosecutor must “inform that State [here Afghanistan] in writing” when she or he requests the resumption of the court’s investigation under article 18(2).

REVISIONS:

This article was last updated on 28 Jul 2022

Delaying Justice? The ICC’s war crimes investigation in limbo over who represents Afghanistan
read more

Arbitrary Power and a Loss of Fundamental Freedoms

July 24, 2022

Kate Clark

 

UNAMA has published its first major report on human rights in Afghanistan since the Taleban came to power on 15 August 2021. It covers a multitude of issues, including detentions, torture and extrajudicial killings, the rights of women and girls and civilian casualties. One recurring theme is the arbitrary way the new administration often works and the unpredictability of its laws, punishments and procedures. Also underlined in the report, says AAN’s Kate Clark, is the critical importance of ‘fundamental freedoms’, the right to peaceful protest and dissent, the existence of a free media and lively human rights organisations, in helping curb the arbitrary power of the state. These, the report documents, have been increasingly under attack in the last ten months.
Taleban restrictions on the rights and freedoms of women and girls, says a new UNAMA report says, “has effectively marginalized and rendered Afghan women voiceless and unseen.” Photo: Ahmad Sahel Arman/AFP, 7 May 2022.

UNAMA’s new report, Human Rights in Afghanistan – 15 August 2021 to 15 June 2022, is comprehensive and authoritative, detailing violations of a wide range of human rights and freedoms by what UNAMA refers to throughout as the ‘de facto’ authorities. It also traces institutional and other changes which have made it harder and more dangerous for Afghans to seek redress, complain, document abuses, or even know for sure what the new administration’s rules are.
This AAN report traces some of the areas highlighted by UNAMA’s Human Rights Service (UNAMA HRS). They include new ways the state is violating Afghans’ rights, for example, Taleban restrictions on women and girls’ access to education, work and travel – although these echo the first Taleban Emirate’s even more extreme curbs. There are also some very old and familiar violations, revenge attacks on members of the former regime, for example, or the methods of torture used by the Taleban’s General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI). Anyone versed in the history of state torture in Afghanistan will recognise the use of kicking, punching and slapping, beatings with cables and pipes and the use of mobile electric shock devices on security detainees. (See AAN’s dossier of reports on detentions and torture here.)

This AAN report also looks at what has facilitated these violations of Afghans’ rights: the clamping down on human rights defenders and the media, the suppression of free speech and peaceful protest and changes in state institutions, which all help to make the deployment of arbitrary and unaccountable state power so much easier.

As always, for far greater detail, including accounts of individual incidents, and the Taleban’s response to UNAMA’s findings, the 58-page report is worth reading in full. There are also whole sections in the UNAMA report that this report has not covered, including civilian casualties up to the Taleban’s seizure of power and since (a subject AAN hopes to return to), conditions in Afghanistan’s prisons and the Taleban’s use of excessive force at checkpoints.

Extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearances, cruel, inhuman and degrading punishments 

UNAMA’s monitoring has indicated a “clear pattern with regards to the targeting of specific groups by the de facto authorities.” These include former members of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), former government officials, individuals accused of affiliation with the armed opposition groups, the National Resistance Front (NRF) and the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP), journalists and civil society, human rights and women’s rights activists and those the Taleban authorities accuse of ‘moral crimes’.

UNAMA says the Taleban’s general amnesty for former government officials and especially former members of the ANSF has been violated:

Between 15 August 2021 and 15 June 2022, UNAMA HRS recorded 160 extrajudicial killings (including 10 women), 178 arbitrary arrests and detentions, 23 instances of incommunicado detention and 56 instances of torture and ill-treatment of former [ANSF] and government officials carried out by the de facto authorities. These incidents occurred in almost all parts of the country and have affected a range of individuals with differing levels of affiliation to the former government: from senior officials to drivers, bodyguards and relatives of former government and [ANSF] members. 

In the first two months of the new administration, UNAMA says, there were reports of groups of individuals being killed, for example, 17 people in Kandahar city between 14 and 15 August, and 14 members of the ANSF who had surrendered in Khedir district of Daikundi province on 31 August. From October 2021 onwards, UNAMA says, it is individuals, rather than groups, have been targeted, often with a person taken out of their house and summarily shot. The list of examples includes two former female Afghan National Police Officers who were reportedly arrested in Kabul and whose bodies were found on 13 November by the side of a road in Gardez, capital of Paktia province. UNAMA has also tracked the arbitrary detentions and torture, not only of former ANSF and government officials themselves but also their relatives.

Since the Taleban capture of power, UNAMA has also documented the new administration targeting Afghans they accuse of being members or supporters of the National Resistance Front. UNAMA has recorded 18 extrajudicial killings, 54 instances of torture and ill-treatment, 113 arbitrary arrests and detentions and 23 cases of incommunicado detention of people accused of being linked to the NRF, mostly in Panjshir and Baghlan provinces. On 31 May, in the Khenj district of Panjshir, for example, “de facto security forces reportedly arrested 22 civilians accused of supporting the NRF. Three were reportedly released following mediation by community elders, while the remaining 19 were transferred to Dashtak prison and then to an unknown location.”

Afghans with alleged links to ISKP have been the focus of some particularly gruesome abuses. UNAMA says it has documented 59 extrajudicial killings, 22 arbitrary arrests and detentions and seven incidents of torture and ill-treatment by the authorities of individuals accused of ISKP affiliation since 15 August, mainly in Nangrahar province and especially in Chaparhar district and Jalalabad city. Extrajudicial killings in the region, it says, reached a peak in October and November 2021.

The incidents followed a similar pattern – bodies, often dismembered and/or beheaded were found, sometimes hanging from trees. Often the victim had been arrested by de facto authorities one or two days prior to the discovery of their body. In some instances, the circumstances around the killing – including the perpetrator – remains unknown, with bodies being found accompanied by notes stating that the individual was killed because they were an ISIL-KP member. 

One of the examples UNAMA gives is the discovery of the body of a tribal elder on 15 November in Chaparhar district.

He had been arrested by the de facto authorities from a mosque the day prior, and was allegedly targeted for suspected [ISKP] affiliation. His body was dismembered, beheaded and his eyes had been gouged out. He reportedly also had bullet wounds. 


UNAMA has also looked at the punishments given to those accused of violating moral or religious codes and has documented 217 instances of cruel, inhuman and degrading punishments since 15 August 2021. They range from shopkeepers in Lashkargah city in Helmand being slapped and kicked in April because they had not gone to pray in the mosque to a man in Tirin Kot, Uruzgan province, convicted of adultery and sentenced to public flogging on 21 February by representatives from the Departments for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, of Information and Culture, and of Justice, judges and the provincial governor. In Badakhshan, a woman who had accused her brother-in-law of sexual assault on 10 October was herself arrested by the provincial chief of police; both she and her alleged perpetrator were sentenced to lashing and were then ordered to marry. On 14 February, in the same province, in Nusay district, a woman and man were publicly stoned to death, accused of having an extramarital relationship, having reportedly been sentenced by the district governor.

The UNAMA report singles out the Taleban intelligence agency, the GDI, for violations, saying it has recorded instances of killings – both in the form of extrajudicial killings and as a result of severe torture – of detainees. On 19 December, for example, in Meskinabad village in Dasht-e Archi district, Kunduz, “a former Afghan Local Police officer was arrested by de facto GDI outside his house. On 22 December, de facto GDI summoned his relatives for a meeting where they handed over the man’s dead body.”

Arrests and detentions by the GDI, the report says, often appear to be arbitrary, with individuals reportedly not informed of the specific charges against them, family members not informed of their whereabouts or denied visits, not granted access to defence lawyers and only seen by a doctor after having been tortured or ill-treated. In some instances, it says, detentions were based on an individual’s role as a media worker or civil society activist.

Curbs on dissent, protest and reporting

A member of the Taleban speaks on a loudspeaker during a demonstration held to condemn a protest by Afghan women’s rights activists in Kabul. Photo: Mohammad Rafsan/AFP, 21 January 2022.

Importantly, the UNAMA report also traces a gradual clamping down on the right to protest and other ‘foundational freedoms’. It points to the campaign of largely unclaimed targeted killings of human rights defenders, journalists and media workers in late 2020 and early 2021, which had already created a climate of fear by the time the Taleban came to power. Many journalists, human rights defenders and activists then sought to flee Afghanistan, fearing a crackdown by the new administration and indeed, since their takeover in August 2021, says UNAMA, the new authorities have:

Increasingly limited the exercise of human rights such as freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of opinion and expression, cracking down on dissent and restricting civic space in the country. The arbitrary arrests and detention of journalists, human rights defenders, protesters have had a chilling effect on freedom of the media and civic activism. The absence of due process in the arrests and detention carried out by the de facto GDI puts individuals outside the scope of judicial supervision and increases the risk of extended pre-trial detention periods. The increasingly intrusive role and activities of the de facto [Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice] have compounded such concerns. 

UNAMA documents the Taleban’s increasing crackdown on peaceful protest, including pursuing activists with house searches, arbitrary arrests and incommunicado detention, all especially problematic for women. Meanwhile, the “once rich Afghan media landscape” has also been under attack, with arbitrary arrests (122 cases, one concerning a woman), incommunicado detention (12, all men), torture and ill-treatment (58 cases, one concerning a woman) and threats or intimidation (33 cases, three concerning women) documented. The report said interlocutors “have increasingly highlighted the role of the de facto GDI in exerting pressure on media entities and journalists through threats, arbitrary arrests, incommunicado detentions.”

As for civil society actors and human rights defenders, the UNAMA report says, they have “stopped their operations in most provinces, fearful of repercussions and restrictions imposed by de facto authorities,” while journalists have “increasingly resorted to self-censorship to cope with the new media environment.”

All in all, says UNAMA, the human rights situation “has been compounded by the measures taken by the de facto authorities to stifle debate, curb dissent and limit the fundamental rights and freedoms of Afghans.

Facilitating abuse

By curbing both protests and dissent and the documentation and reporting of violations, the Emirate has made it easier for further violations to be perpetrated. The Emirate has also facilitated abuses by its officials in other ways. One theme running through the UNAMA report is the arbitrary nature of the new administration, of how rules are decided and enforced and violations punished by Taleban officials and agencies.

One example is the role of the newly re-established Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (commonly referred to as the vice and virtue ministry), whose mandate, the UNAMA report says, “seems to include a mix of policy setting, advice, monitoring, complaints management, and enforcement authority on a range of issues connected with the de facto authorities’ interpretation of what is needed to ensure the propagation of virtue and prevention of vice.” (See AAN’s recent report on the thinking behind the new ministry here.) Over the first ten months of the Taleban administration, UNAMA says it has noted increased instructions from the ministry whether prohibitions, for example, on music, displays of images of women, and the use of cosmetics, or ordering, for example, face-coverings for women, mahrams (close male relative) to chaperone women in public and public prayers for men, or advice “on a seemingly open-ended set of other issues (including but not limited to the length of hair and beards; restrictions on women’s practicing sports, driving, access to public bathing establishments).”

Many of these instructions, says UNAMA, involve the “curtailment of fundamental human rights such as freedom of movement, freedom of expression and right to privacy.” Their legal nature is also uncertain, and often they are “simply announced by a spokesperson in a media interview or via Twitter, leave the system open for interpretation and abuse.” There has also been wide variation in what provincial departments of the ministry have instructed citizens locally to do or not to do. Moreover, the scope of the instructions, UNAMA says, “seems to be purposefully vague, which poses concerns in terms of compliance with the principle of legality, and the element of specificity.”

UNAMA has documented cases where ministry personnel have punished people for violating advice or when they had not actually broken rules. For example, in January 2022, in Taloqan, capital of Takhar province, city, vice and virtue officials “verbally abused a group of three women who were shopping in the bazar with their young children because they were out of the house without a mahram” while in April, in Lashkargah in Helmand province, officials verbally abused a group of women who were shopping in the bazaar without mahrams and beat male shopkeepers for allowing the women to be in their stores unaccompanied; the police subsequently arrested 12 shopkeepers. Yet, the official rule for women is that a mahram is only required for journeys of more than 78 kilometres, while the instruction for women not to leave the house unless necessary is advisory only.

The vice and virtue ministry is also the avenue where citizens are supposed to be able to make complaints through a telephone hotline and a three-stage adjudication or referral decision-making process. UNAMA does not report on how well this is working, but does say that the Taleban’s abolishment of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), an A-status national human rights institution under the Paris Principles, on 4 May 2022 “leaves a void that will be difficult to fill. Notwithstanding the establishment of some avenues for citizens to submit complaints to various de facto governmental entities, the absence of an independent national human rights institution will inevitably affect human rights accountability in Afghanistan.”

Violations of the rights of women and girls

“Despite prior assurances during negotiations in Doha and at a 17 August 2021 press conference in Kabul,” writes UNAMA, “that assured women of their rights ‘within the framework of Sharia law’” and that there will be “no violence (…) and no discrimination against women,” women and girls have seen the progressive restriction of their human rights and freedoms. These, it says, stem from the Taleban’s “conservative theo-political position on the role of women.”

Most fundamentally, there are no women in the Taleban’s cabinet or indeed any decision-making forums at national or sub-national levels, denying them the opportunity even to be consulted on matters that affect them and their families. Restrictions, either de facto or as official orders or ‘advice’, specifically on the lives of women and girls include: the ongoing closure of girls’ schools beyond sixth grade; forcing women to have mahrams outside the home, including only allowing women to leave the country if they are with a mahram; orders for women to cover their faces outside and only leave the home if necessary; gender segregation of parks, gardens, and picnic venues in Kabul and; bans on employment by the government except in key roles, for example, health, education and some policing. Widows, the report says, and other women heading households are particularly affected by many of these orders, given that many are predicated on women having male ‘guardians’ to support and represent them.

Afghanistan’s often poor record on violence against women has worsened, with “the dissolution of dedicated mechanisms established to deal with cases of violence against women and girls.” Even where the Taleban have promoted some rights for women, for example, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada’s 3 December 2021 decree on women which upheld their women not to be forced into marriage and for widows to enjoy their inheritance rights, UNAMA said it had recorded instances where the authorities – including judges, provincial governors and others – had broken this ruling.

For example, on 15 February, in the Tarin Kot district of Uruzgan province, a woman and her brother were summoned to court regarding her rejection of an offer of marriage, reported UNAMA.

The judges of the de facto Primary Court tried to force the woman to accept, and when she refused they beat her and her brother severely. They were forced to flee their home, fearing further retribution, and her other brother who stayed behind was subsequently detained by the de facto authorities in an attempt to get the woman to accept the proposal.

In another example, from 27 April, a 15-year-old girl told UNAMA she had been sold to an older man by her father, whom she did not want to marry and from whom she had run away with another man whom she married. After her father filed a complaint, the police locked her up, ordered her to divorce her husband and marry the man of her father’s choosing. She remains in detention, with her case reportedly before the court.

For any woman or girl facing domestic violence or sexual assault, the restrictions on their basic rights and freedoms – to work, go to school, travel, and leave the country – and their absence now from decision-making and as judges and lawyers in courts, all make it easier for violent perpetrators to abuse their victims unhindered. It also makes it less likely for victims to get redress. And for women as a whole Taleban restrictions on their rights and freedoms, says UNAMA, “has effectively marginalized and rendered Afghan women voiceless and unseen.”

Conclusion

UNAMA Human Rights Service is now the only extant, on-the-ground, nationwide body documenting human rights violations and trying to hold the new administration to account. It is also one of the few bodies that continues to engage with the Taleban at central, provincial and district levels, bringing, as it says, credible reports of human rights violations to the attention of relevant ministries and departments and raising awareness of human rights standards, instruments and mechanisms.[1] UNAMA says it has appreciated “the willingness of the de facto authorities to engage on various issues, including reports of human rights violations.” It has provided a critical public service in producing and publishing this report.

The report ends with an almost philosophical defence of human rights and how respect for them is integral to Afghanistan’s future:

Ten months after the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan still faces uncertainty over its political, security and socio-economic future. The economic, financial and humanitarian crisis, exacerbated by the sanctions and suspension of non-humanitarian aid flows, continues to negatively affect Afghans’ human rights, including to an adequate standard of living. 

Afghan women and men legitimately expect from the de facto authorities an inclusive governing vision that fosters peace, social cohesion and economic development. It is imperative that such a vision is based on fundamental human rights, as without them people’s participation in public affairs is limited, security is ephemeral, and development is not sustainable. Human rights are not only about complaints being heard, but also about different voices being able to be expressed without fear and being valued as enriching social life. 

Edited by Roxanna Shapour

References

References
↑1 The other body still active is, of course, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), although its role is to work with the authorities and other conflict actors behind the scenes.

 

Arbitrary Power and a Loss of Fundamental Freedoms
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Afghanistan: Taliban Execute, ‘Disappear’ Alleged Militants

July 7, 2022
Human Rights Watch

Over 100 Bodies Found Dumped in Canal in East

(New York) – Taliban security forces have summarily executed and forcibly disappeared alleged members and supporters of an Islamic State offshoot in eastern Afghanistan, Human Rights Watch said today. Since the Taliban took power in August 2021, residents of Nangahar and Kunar provinces east of Kabul have discovered the bodies of more than 100 men dumped in canals and other locations.

Taliban forces have carried out abusive search operations, including night raids, against residents they accuse of sheltering or supporting members of the Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISKP) armed group, the Afghan affiliate of the Islamic State (ISIS). During these raids, Taliban forces have beaten residents and have detained men they accuse of being ISKP members without legal process or revealing their whereabouts to their families. An unknown number have been summarily executed – shot, hanged, or beheaded – or forcibly disappeared.

“We investigated an emptied canal in Nangarhar in which over 100 bodies have been dumped between August 2021 and April 2022,” said Patricia Gossman, associate Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Taliban authorities appear to have given their forces free rein to detain, ‘disappear,’ and kill alleged militants.”

Between October 2021 and June 2022, Human Rights Watch, working with a local organization that cannot be identified for security reasons, interviewed 63 people, including 42 in person in Nangarhar and Kunar provinces, and 21 by phone.

In November, a team from both groups counted 54 bodies of men, many in an advanced state of decomposition, along a 15 to 20 kilometer stretch of the emptied canal. The bodies showed evidence of torture and brutal executions: some had missing limbs, ropes around their necks, or had been beheaded or had slit throats. Healthcare workers in Nangarhar said that they had registered 118 bodies that had been found across the province between August and December.

A media report cited one Taliban fighter who said, “We conduct night raids and whenever we find a Daesh [ISIS] member, we just kill them.” The United Nations has reported that Taliban operations against ISKP “rely heavily on extra-judicial detentions and killings.”

Over a number of years ISKP has carried out bombings particularly targeting Hazara, Shia, and other religious minority communities, as well as against Taliban and former government forces. The armed group springs from a minority violent stream of Salafism, a movement that looks back to the earliest years of Islam for moral guidance.

Human Rights Watch has previously documented Taliban forces summarily executing or forcibly disappearing former Afghan government officials and security forces. The cases from eastern Afghanistan demonstrate that Taliban forces have extended such atrocities to those they accuse of links to ISKP, Human Rights Watch said.

International humanitarian law, or the laws of war, which applies to the armed conflict between the Taliban and ISKP, obligates all parties to treat everyone in custody humanely. Arbitrary detentions, summary executions, and other forms of mistreatment are prohibited, and those responsible are subject to prosecution for war crimes. Also prohibited are enforced disappearances, which international law defines as the detention of anyone by state forces or their agents followed by a refusal to acknowledge the detention or whereabouts of the person.

Suspected ISKP members taken into custody for criminal offenses should be promptly brought before a judge, appropriately charged, provided access to relatives and legal counsel, and prosecuted in accordance with international fair trial standards.

“The ISKP’s numerous atrocities do not justify the Taliban’s horrific response,” Gossman said. “Taliban forces have repeatedly carried out summary executions and other war crimes against people in their custody and have yet to hold those responsible to account.”

For detailed findings, please see below.

Human Rights Watch and the local organization found substantial evidence of summary executions and enforced disappearances by the Taliban of people accused of supporting the ISKP. There was extensive evidence from the Darunta Canal, near Jalalabad, which the groups visited and where they documented scores of killings by inspecting corpses discovered there in late 2021. The interviews revealed that many of those killed were people whom the Taliban had earlier taken into custody.

Taliban-ISKP Conflict in Nangarhar and Kunar

Taliban forces took control of Nangarhar’s capital, Jalalabad, on August 15, 2021, the same day they took power in Kabul. In the ensuing months, Taliban security forces carried out search operations to apprehend and detain former members of the Afghan National Security Forces and ISKP members.

When ISKP attacks on Taliban forces continued after August, particularly in Nangarhar’s eastern districts of Dehbala, Shinwar Mohmand Dara, Achin, and Kama, the Taliban intensified their campaign against ISKP. In November the Taliban deployed hundreds of fighters against ISKP forces. Taliban officials in statements to the media have claimed that their forces have “eliminated” ISKP “98 percent,” and that the group is “no longer considered a serious threat in Afghanistan.” However, the alleged brutality with which the Taliban has conducted operations may spark increased recruitment to ISKP in the province.

On several occasions, Taliban officials claimed to have seriously degraded or destroyed ISKP. However, ISKP forces have continued to attack Taliban units, typically by means of magnetic improvised explosive devices (IEDs), roadside bombs, and hit-and-run assaults on Taliban checkpoints. They have also continued their unlawful bombings of Hazara and Shia communities, killing and maiming numerous civilians.

Taliban Night Raids and Collective Punishment

Since taking power, Taliban forces have conducted night raids in residential areas, a tactic that has long been a feature of counterinsurgency operations by all parties in the Afghanistan conflict. These raids have frequently included abuses.

The Taliban have targeted many neighborhoods known for being home to Salafists, a community that follows a form of Islam modeled on the beliefs and practices of the earliest Muslims of the 7th century. These raids appear aimed not only against ISKP fighters, but also to punish residents who may have no involvement with ISKP because of their adherence to Salafism.

From September through November, Nangarhar and Kunar residents reported a wave of Taliban operations and the enforced disappearance and killing of Salafis. In some cases, relatives alleged that the Taliban took away their family members, and afterward denied that the men were in their custody. In other cases, residents said they found the bodies of relatives who had been taken away. Some were reportedly found beheaded.

Residents from Kunar province, a province that has long seen conflict between the Taliban and the former government, ISKP, or other armed groups, said they were being targeted. They said Taliban fighters stopped and questioned men on the streets, sometimes beating or humiliating them in public if the Taliban discovered or suspected the men were Salafists.

One man said: “Kunaris cannot say anything [about this treatment]. If you do, they say you are Daesh [ISIS].” A man from Marawara district, Kunar province, who had been stopped by the Taliban in Jalalabad said: “When they found out that I am Salafi, they shaved my beard and head in front hundreds of people and made me sit there for hours.”

Salafi elders said that because of the continued raids, Salafi community elders in a number of districts felt pressure to pledge their support to the Taliban authorities. The Taliban have also registered members of Salafi communities, which, among other things, facilitates Taliban monitoring of community members.

While there are no verified numbers of those killed and forcibly disappeared since August 2021, bodies of some victims have been displayed in various parts of Jalalabad and the surrounding area. Between August and December in the Farm Adda park, south of Jalalabad, local residents and relatives said that while looking for missing family members they found bodies of people whom the Taliban had taken hanging from trees. Taliban officials have acknowledged that they have displayed bodies along main roads and intersections as a warning to others that “this is what happens” if you join the ISKP. Family members have found the bodies of their relatives in the neighborhood known as Khalis Baba in Khogyani. Others have discovered bodies in canals and rivers.

Disentangling the killings of former Afghan government security force members from those accused of being linked to ISKP is difficult, although they follow somewhat different patterns. When the Taliban have targeted former security force members, they appear to single people out based on the position they previously held, or because they were known to Taliban fighters and commanders in the area.

Community elders, family members of victims, and analysts who have studied ISKP said that the Taliban frequently carried out mass arrests based on guilt by association rather than any determination of ISKP links. Many of the Salafists detained appear to have been picked up because they lived in certain neighborhoods or Salafist villages. Community elders and family members said that bodies found often had distinctive clothing, long beards, and other typically Salafist characteristics.

A health worker at a local hospital said that by late December, hospital staff had registered 118 dead bodies that had been found across Nangarhar, and that most people who came to inquire about the bodies were from Kunar, Jalalabad city, and districts surrounding Jalalabad. It is likely that not all bodies found would be registered or taken to a hospital.

Darunta Canal

The Darunta Canal flows from a hydroelectric power plant seven kilometers west of Jalalabad in Nangarhar province. In the early morning of November 7, local officials stopped the flow of water through the dam in response to a request from residents living along the canal who wanted to retrieve the body of a boy who had drowned a day earlier. Once the flow through the dam stopped, the entire canal dried up.

A team from Human Rights Watch and the Afghan organization carried out an investigation along the canal on the morning of November 7, covering about 15 to 20 kilometers of the canal by car over 2 hours and 30 minutes. The team counted 54 bodies – all male – in the emptied canal. While it was difficult to determine ages, none appeared to be older than about 50. Fifteen bodies were considered to be in a very advanced state of decomposition. Seven had been beheaded and others had their throats slit but had not been decapitated. Two had ropes around their necks, suggesting that they had been hanged before being thrown into the canal. Some bodies had limbs missing. Only a few had visible bullet wounds, although this could not be determined with accuracy since some were badly decomposed.

The team interviewed residents living along the canal, one of whom directed them to a location called Muqam Khan, close to the Sarhadi Lewa, a Taliban military installation. In this area, bodies were visible in the dried canal bed. Some were scattered and others grouped together. Some appeared to have been in the water for some time, based on their advanced state of decomposition.

The residents said that since August 2021, the canal had become well-known as a place to dispose of bodies. Five families living along the canal confirmed that they had seen bodies when the water was drained. “Most were thrown into the canal between August and November, when the Taliban were detaining and disappearing men accused of being ISKP,” one resident said.

Another resident said that there had been at least five IED attacks against the Taliban in the Muqam Khan area after August, and the Taliban might have dumped the bodies there to send a message.

“Habib,” a pseudonym, who is a resident of Surkhrod district, said:

When the canal dried up, 10 bodies were found near Kabul Adda [the station for Kabul-bound buses]. This area of the canal, called “barong,” has a net that prevents trash or other material from entering and blocking the canal; the bodies were stuck in the net. Word got out and the Taliban came and would not allow people to come near. An hour later, an ambulance came and took the bodies away. Some of the bodies were headless; some were rotten, and discolored. Most of the bodies were unidentifiable. I think these people were thrown into the canal at this place.

While many bodies were recovered on November 7, people continued to find bodies afterward. Later in November, Habib was bathing in the canal after working as a day laborer. He said, “Something soft touched me. It was wrapped up like a parcel, a body was inside. My colleague and I took it to the hospital.”

“Zekirya”, a resident of Nazrabad Kalay, Surkhorud district, also recovered bodies from the canal. He saw four bodies “stuck in the net in the canal on November 7, 2021.”

“Sadullah,” a day laborer from Tatang Kala, Surkhorud district, found bodies in the canal in late November. He said:

We were cleaning the canal when my friends found two wrapped objects. The bodies were inside. They were attached with stones before being thrown in the water. The bodies smelled and appeared to have been in the water for days. Some people had gathered around who took the bodies to the hospital [morgue].

The body of a man named Wahabudden, from Fatehabad village, Surkhorod district, was among those found in the canal. Taliban forces had taken him and his brother Gulapudden into custody in mid-October. A Fatehabad resident said:

On November 20, 2021, we found Wahabudden’s dead body in the [Darunta] canal, and Gulapudden is still missing. Wahabudden was shot twice in the shoulder, and also his throat was cut. There was also a stone attached to Wahabudden’s chest, so his body didn’t rise to the surface.

Wahabudden’s body was found 13 days after the discovery of most of the other bodies in the canal bed.

“Ahmad,” searched in vain for the body of his brother Nazeerullah, who had been detained by the Taliban on October 7. When he learned from a relative that the water into the Darunta canal would be stopped on November 7, family members came to search. Ahmad said that his relatives had warned him that the bodies would be hard to recognize, but said “our heart could not stop [hoping] so we went.” He described the scene at the canal:

[One] could not recognize most of the bodies. … They were not all at the same place but spread across the bed of the canal. It is possible they [the Taliban] threw one body here, another somewhere else. The distance between the bodies varied: between some bodies 10 meters, some 100 meters, some even more distant. … We looked at [almost] the entire canal by car. … our guy [Nazeerullah] had a scar on one hand, and we were checking the dead bodies for the scar … I do not remember an exact number, but I am sure close to 100 people were there [in the canal]. I heard some were already taken away by their relatives and other people. Because Nazeerullah had a scar on his arm, we thought we might recognize him. We were there from 9:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. … Seeing all those dead bodies, it had a huge impact on me, mentally.

He did not find Nazeerullah.

Additional Summary Executions and Enforced Disappearances

“Doctor” Mubariz
According to his patients and others in the community, Mubariz, between 40 and 45 years old, was respected for his knowledge of health care although he did not have a medical degree. He operated private clinics across the east and southeast Afghanistan, including many small clinics in Nangarhar, for which he hired medical staff. The last clinic he opened with one of his colleagues was in the Smarkhail area of Jalalabad city. After August 2021, he continued to run the clinic, as he did the others. Taliban forces took Mubariz and his partner into custody from this clinic in early September. About 10 days later, his body was discovered in Jalalabad with a gunshot wound.

A witness to Mubariz’s arrest told the family that “[t]he [Taliban] came in a vehicle that had the markings of the previous government’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), wearing NDS uniforms. They were members of the Taliban’s intelligence forces, the General Directorate of Intelligence.” The family said that they received a call the evening of the arrest informing them that Mubariz had been taken to Amniat-e Milli, the national security district headquarters. The family went to the headquarters and were told Mubariz was there: “We were not allowed to see him, though the Taliban said, ‘He is here with us.’”

Family members said that the next day they returned to the headquarters accompanied by community elders: “We sat next to the door of Amniat-e Milli until our turn came to talk to the officials. But we could not see Dr. Mubariz.” An official at the gate told the family “You go back home. His case is still [under investigation] but there is nothing in the file [on him].”

About nine days after the arrest, Mubariz called his oldest son at around 10 p.m. He told him: “Son, my heart is suffocated here. No one has beaten me, no one said a bad thing to me. They have been telling me I will be released tomorrow but you should try to release me sooner. Come for me, bring elders to secure my release. They [the Taliban] should punish me if I am guilty of having ties with ISKP.” The family did not know how Mubariz got access to a phone. A Taliban official told us that “Dr. Mubariz did not call from his number but from a new number, which could have been provided by Taliban inside the facility.”

The next day at 9 a.m. the family received a call from neighbors that Mubariz’s body had been found along with two other bodies in the Farm Ada area of Jalalabad. A man who found the bodies said they appeared to have been killed during the night. Mubariz’s body had a letter attached to it that said: “Dr. Mubariz, Daesh surgical doctor,” suggesting he was working for or providing health care to ISKP. A tribal elder said: “This is a lie that he was a Daesh doctor.”

Mubariz’s partner was released but said they had been separated in detention and he did not know what had happened.

International humanitarian law protects all personnel from mistreatment, including those who provide medical care for opposing armed forces or armed groups.

Muhammad Baz
Muhammad Baz was from Badel Valley, Narang district, in Kunar province. His family and community members said he was a Salafist, yet had also fought with the Taliban.

One relative said that on September 20, Baz left his home in Narang district to go on a business-related trip to Spin Boldak, in Kandahar province. The Taliban stopped him at a checkpoint in the Darunta area of Jalalabad city.

He was allowed to call his family and told them that when the Taliban had checked his phone, they found some Salafist material on it. He also told his family that he had contacted Saleh, the district head of intelligence for Narang district and that Saleh had told the Taliban that Baz was a “mujahid,” a member of the Taliban, and not ISKP. But the Taliban who detained Baz said he could not leave.

Baz’s family and friends said that when they tried to call the phone later it was turned off. A cousin went to the Darunta area where Baz was detained. He asked local residents what they had seen. One witness, a merchant, said, “The Taliban detained someone [who matched Baz’s description], put him in a Ranger [truck], and went toward the city [Jalalabad].”

The next day, Baz’s family received a call from a clinic to come to collect the body, which had been found by a driver in the hilly desert areas of Memla in Khogyani district. Baz’s throat had been slit; his name was on a piece of paper attached to the body. His family and others believe that the Taliban killed Baz because he was a Salafist, wore a long beard, and had Salafist material on his phone.

Nazeerullah
Taliban security forces in Kama district, Nangarhar, detained Nazeerullah, on October 7. His brother “Jawad” said:

At around 10:30 a.m., Taliban forces raided our house. They were in two vehicles: a Ranger and a silver Toyota Fielder. Four of them entered the house forcibly and arrested my brother, who is around 43 years old and is a laborer and finds food for his family through hard work. He was taken to the car in front of several witnesses. … [T]en minutes later the Taliban took two of my sons [Ibrahim and Subhanullah] who were working in the fields near the mosque.

A villager who saw the arrest said that he had asked the Taliban, “‘Where are you taking these boys?’ and they said, ‘We are taking them to the district [center].’”

Jawad said he went immediately to the district center but was not allowed to see any Taliban officials. The next day he tried again, without success. The third day, more family members from Kunar went to the district center and with a guarantee provided by Bakhtiur Rahman, a local influential figure, the Taliban released Ibrahim and Subhanullah.

Jawad said that Qari Yasir, the Taliban’s Kama district police chief, and the head of the General Directorate of Intelligence, Shaheen, told him that the district governor, Hekmat Adil, had ordered the arrest. Jawad said that he went to see Adil, who told him that a battalion from Kabul had come and taken Nazeerullah with them.

Jawad said he then filed petitions first with the Nangarhar provincial governor, Mohammad Daud Muzamil, and then with the deputy governor asking them to order Kama district officials to produce Nazeerullah. He received no response. He then petitioned Interior Ministry officials to produce Nazeerullah, but also received no response. Finally, he wrote to the appellate court of Nangarhar, which referred the case to the primary military court of the eastern zone. The family has learned nothing about Nazeerullah’s whereabouts.

Other cases of enforced disappearance were similar. A woman whose son was taken by the Taliban in September said that no one would tell her where he was detained: “They do not allow me to go to the district [district governor or police] … I spent hours and hours in front of the governor’s house, no one allowed me in or even asked me. I do not know what to do.”

Taliban officials have also threatened family members who have sought information about their detained relatives. One resident of Chapahar district, Nangahar, who accompanied “Jaffar” to the Taliban’s General Directorate of Intelligence Facility No. 90 in Kabul to inquire about the whereabouts of Jaffar’s brother, whom the Taliban had detained in September, said that the guard at the gate told him: “They will arrest you too, do not inquire about these people.” Jaffar said “I was afraid but what can I do? I want to know, [he’s] my brother.”

In another case, a man said that his brother and nephew went to the Nangarhar chief of police to ask the whereabouts of a relative. The Taliban commander who met them threatened them, saying: “Shut up, you have come here to release Daesh people.” Another man said, “You want to ask [about your relative], but you do not dare ask.”

Even if they are not threatened, family members seeking information about detained relatives have said that Taliban authorities refuse to acknowledge the detention or provide any information. A neighbor of a man who was the victim of an enforced disappearance by the Taliban for alleged connections to ISKP said: “When you go to see the Nangarhar [provincial] governor [looking for a relative], they won’t let you in. At the gates they tell you go ask elsewhere [referring to other government departments]. Just to deter you.”

Nasir
Nasir, an alleged ISKP member, had been arrested by the former Afghan government some time before the Taliban takeover. He was serving time in Bagram jail, and when the Taliban took over, he broke out. He started a fruit cart business in Charahi Butkhak in Kabul in late August. Local workers said that on September 20 “vehicles full of Taliban [came] and took Nasir with them.” His brother went first to the District 12 police station, and then he and other family members went to the Bagrami district governor’s office in Parwan province, but they were repeatedly told that the Taliban had not detained anyone by his name. A family member said that we “just want to know he is alive … if he had done anything [wrong], put him on trial.”

Not all cases reported in Nangarhar and Kunar provinces involved people accused of affiliation with ISKP.

Ahmadullah
Ahmadullah, 25, served in the military in the previous government. His relatives said that in September, Taliban forces surrounded the Surkhab Pul area of Jalalabad city and went directly to Ahmadullah’s house. The Taliban authorities used loudspeakers to pressure the family to hand him over and threatened to enter the house if they did not. In front of a gathering of villagers, the family handed Ahmadullah over to the Taliban forces.

Three days later, Ahmadullah’s father received a call telling him that his son’s body was lying in the Khalis Baba area. The father said that when he saw his son’s body, Ahmadullah’s name and village were written on a paper attached to it. The bodies of about seven or eight others were also found in the area.

Afghanistan: Taliban Execute, ‘Disappear’ Alleged Militants
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Hope and despair: Kathy Gannon on 35 years in Afghanistan

July 6, 2022

Hope and despair: Kathy Gannon on 35 years in Afghanistan

By KATHY GANNON
Associated Press
July 3, 2022
FILE - In this Saturday, Oct. 1, 2011 file photo, Associated Press Special Regional Correspondent for Afghanistan and Pakistan Kathy Gannon sits with girls at a school in Kandahar, Afghanistan. A Kabul court announced Wednesday, July 23, 2014 that the Afghan police officer charged with killing Associated Press photographer Anja Niedringhaus and wounding veteran AP correspondent Kathy Gannon has been convicted and sentenced to death.(AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus, File)
FILE – In this Saturday, Oct. 1, 2011 file photo, Associated Press Special Regional Correspondent for Afghanistan and Pakistan Kathy Gannon sits with girls at a school in Kandahar, Afghanistan. A Kabul court announced Wednesday, July 23, 2014 that the Afghan police officer charged with killing Associated Press photographer Anja Niedringhaus and wounding veteran AP correspondent Kathy Gannon has been convicted and sentenced to death.(AP Photo/Anja Niedringhaus, File)

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Afghan policeman opened fire on us with his AK-47, emptying 26 bullets into the back of the car. Seven slammed into me, and at least as many into my colleague, Associated Press photographer Anja Niedringhaus. She died at my side.

Anja weighed heavy against my shoulder. I tried to look at her but I couldn’t move. I looked down; all I could see was what looked like a stump where my left hand had been. I could barely whisper, “Please help us.”

Our driver raced us to a small local hospital in Khost, siren on. I tried to stay calm, thinking over and over: “Don’t be afraid. Don’t die afraid. Just breathe.”

At the hospital, Dr. Abdul Majid Mangal said he would have to operate and tried to reassure me. His words are forever etched in my heart: “Please know your life is as important to me as it is to you.”

Much later, as I recovered in New York during a process that would turn out to eventually require 18 operations, an Afghan friend called from Kabul. He wanted to apologize for the shooting on behalf of all Afghans.

I said the shooter didn’t represent a nation, a people. My mind returned to Dr. Mangal – for me, it was him who represented Afghanistan and Afghans.

I have reported on Afghanistan for the AP for the past 35 years, during an extraordinary series of events and regime changes that have rocked the world. Through it all, the kindness and resilience of ordinary Afghans have shone through – which is also what has made it so painful to watch the slow erosion of their hope.

I have always been amazed at how Afghans stubbornly hung on to hope against all odds, greeting each of several new regimes with optimism. But by 2018, a Gallup poll showed that the fraction of people in Afghanistan with hope in the future was the lowest ever recorded anywhere.

It didn’t have to be this way.

_____

I arrived in Afghanistan in 1986, in the middle of the Cold War. It seems a lifetime ago. It is.

Then, the enemy attacking Afghanistan was the communist former Soviet Union, dubbed godless by United States President Ronald Reagan. The defenders were the U.S.-backed religious mujahedeen, defined as those who engage in holy war, championed by Reagan as freedom fighters.

Reagan even welcomed some mujahedeen leaders to the White House. Among his guests was Jalaluddin Haqqani, the father of the current leader of the Haqqani network, who in today’s world is a declared terrorist.

At that time, the God versus communism message was strong. The University of Nebraska even crafted an anti-communist curriculum to teach English to the millions of Afghan refugees living in camps in neighboring Pakistan. The university made the alphabet simple: J was for Jihad or holy war against the communists; K was for the Kalashnikov guns used in jihad, and I was for Infidel, which described the communists themselves.

There was even a math program. The questions went something like: If there were 10 communists and you killed five, how many would you have left?

When I covered the mujahedeen, I spent a lot of time and effort on being stronger, walking longer, climbing harder and faster. At one point, I ran out of a dirty mud hut with them and hid under a nearby cluster of trees. Just minutes later, Russian helicopter gunships flew low, strafed the trees and all but destroyed the hut.

The Russians withdrew in 1989 without a win. In 1992, the mujahedeen took power.

Ordinary Afghans hoped fervently that the victory of the mujahedeen would mean the end of war. They also to some degree welcomed a religious ideology that was more in line with their largely conservative country than communism.

But it wasn’t long before the mujahedeen turned their guns on each other.

The fighting was brutal, with the mujahedeen pounding the capital, Kabul, from the hills. Thrice the AP lost its equipment to thieving warlords, only to be returned after negotiations with the top warlord. One day I counted as many as 200 incoming and outgoing rockets inside of minutes.

The bloodletting of the mujahedeen-cum government ministers-cum warlords killed upward of 50,000 people. I saw a 5-year-old girl killed by a rocket as she stepped out of her house. Children by the scores lost limbs to booby traps placed by mujahedeen as they departed neighborhoods.

I stayed on the front line with a woman and her two small children in the Macroyan housing complex during the heaviest rocketing. Her husband, a former communist government employee, had fled, and she lived by making and selling bread each day with her children.

She opened her home to me even though she had so little. All night we stayed in the one room without windows. She asked me if I would take her son to Pakistan the next day, but in the end could not bear to see him go.

Only months after my visit, they were killed by warlords who wanted their apartment.

___

Despite the chaos of the time, Afghans still had hope.

In the waning days of the warring mujahedeen’s rule, I attended a wedding in Kabul where both the wedding party and guests were coiffed and downright glamorous. When asked how she managed to look so good with so little amid the relentless rocketing, one young woman replied brightly, “We’re not dead yet!”

The wedding was delayed twice because of rockets.

The Taliban had by then emerged. They were former mujahedeen and often Islamic clerics who had returned to their villages and their religious schools after 1992. They came together in response to the relentless killing and thieving of their former comrades-in-arms.

By mid-1996, the Taliban were on Kabul’s doorstep, with their promise of burqas for women and beards for men. Yet Afghans welcomed them. They hoped the Taliban would at least bring peace.

When asked about the repressive restrictions of the Taliban, one woman who had worked for an international charity said: “If I know there is peace and my child will be alive, I will wear the burqa.”

Peace did indeed come to Afghanistan, at least of sorts. Afghans could leave their doors unlocked without fear of being robbed. The country was disarmed, and travel anywhere in Afghanistan at any time of the day or night was safe.

But Afghans soon began to see their peace as a prison. The Taliban’s rule was repressive. Public punishments such as chopping off hands and rules that denied girls school and women work brought global sanctions and isolation. Afghans got poorer.

The Taliban leader at the time was the reclusive Mullah Mohammad Omar, rumored to have removed his own eye after being wounded in a battle against invading Soviet soldiers. As international sanctions crippled Afghanistan, Omar got closer to al-Qaida, until eventually the terrorist group became the Taliban’s only source of income.

By 2001, al-Qaida’s influence was complete. Despite a pledge from Omar to safeguard them, Afghanistan’s ancient statues of Buddha were destroyed, in an order reportedly from Osama bin Laden himself.

Then came the seismic shock of 9/11.

Many Afghans mourned the American deaths so far away. Few even knew who bin Laden was. But the country was now squarely a target in the eyes of the United States. Amir Shah, AP’s longtime correspondent, summed up what most Afghans were thinking at the time: “America will set Afghanistan on fire.”

And it did.

After 9/11, the Taliban threw all foreigners out of Afghanistan, including me. The U.S.-led coalition assault began on Oct. 7, 2001.

By Oct. 23, I was back in Kabul, the only Western journalist to see the last weeks of Taliban rule. The powerful B-52 bombers of the U.S. pounded the hills and even landed in the city.

On Nov. 12 that year, a 2,000-pound bomb landed on a house near the AP office. It threw me across the room and blew out window and door frames. Glass shattered and sprayed everywhere.

By sunrise the next day, the Taliban were gone from Kabul.

___

Afghanistan’s next set of rulers marched into the city, brought by the powerful military might of the U.S.-led coalition.

The mujahedeen were back.

The U.S. and U.N. returned them to power even though some among them had brought bin Laden from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996, promising him a safe haven. The hope of Afghans went through the roof, because they believed the powerful U.S. would help them keep the mujahedeen in check.

With more than 40 countries involved in their homeland, they believed peace and prosperity this time was most certainly theirs. Foreigners were welcome everywhere.

Some Afghans worried about the returning mujahedeen, remembering the corruption and fighting when they last were in power. But America’s representative at the time, Zalmay Khalilzad, told me that the mujahedeen had been warned against returning to their old ways.

Yet worrying signs began to emerge. The revenge killings began, and the U.S.-led coalition sometimes participated without knowing the details. The mujahedeen would falsely identify enemies – even those who had worked with the U.S. before – as belonging to al-Qaida or to the Taliban.

One such mistake happened early in December 2001 when a convoy was on its way to meet the new President Hamid Karzai. The U.S.-led coalition bombed it because they were told the convoy bore fighters from the Taliban and al-Qaida. They turned out to be tribal elders.

Secret prisons emerged. Hundreds of Afghan men disappeared. Families became desperate.

Resentment soared especially among the ethnic Pashtuns, who had been the backbone of the Taliban. One former Taliban member proudly displayed his new Afghan identity card and wanted to start a water project in his village. But corrupt government officials extorted him for his money, and he returned to the Taliban.

A deputy police chief in southern Zabul province told me of 2,000 young Pashtun men, some former Taliban, who wanted to join the new government’s Afghan National Army. But they were mocked for their ethnicity, and eventually all but four went to the mountains and joined the Taliban.

In the meantime, corruption seemed to reach epic proportions, with suitcases of money, often from the CIA, handed off to Washington’s Afghan allies. Yet schools were built, roads were reconstructed and a new generation of Afghans, at least in the cities, grew up with freedoms their parents had not known and in many cases looked on with suspicion.

Then came the shooting in 2014 that would change my life.

It began as most days do in Afghanistan: Up before 6 a.m. This day we were waiting for a convoy of Afghan police and military to leave the eastern city of Khost for a remote region to distribute the last of the ballot boxes for Afghanistan’s 2014 presidential elections.

After 30 minutes navigating past blown-out bridges and craters that pockmarked the road, we arrived at a large police compound. For more than an hour, Anja and I talked with and photographed about a dozen police officials.

We finished our work just as a light drizzle began. We got into the car and waited to leave for a nearby village. That’s when the shooting happened.

It was two years before I was able to return to work and to Afghanistan.

___

By that point, the disappointment and disenchantment with America’s longest war had already set in. Despite the U.S. spending over $148 billion on development alone over 20 years, the percentage of Afghans barely surviving at the poverty level was increasing yearly.

In 2019, Pakistan began accepting visa applications at its consulate in eastern Afghanistan. People were so desperate to leave that nine died in a stampede.

In 2020, the U.S. and the Taliban signed a deal for troops to withdraw within 18 months. The U.S. and NATO began to evacuate their staff, closing down embassies and offering those who worked for them asylum.

The mass closure of embassies was baffling to me because the Taliban had made no threats, and it sparked panic in Kabul. It was the sudden and secret departure of President Ashraf Ghani that finally brought the Taliban back into the city on Aug. 15, 2021.

Their swift entry came as a surprise, along with the thorough collapse of the neglected Afghan army, beset by deep corruption. The Taliban’s rapid march toward Kabul fed a rush toward the airport.

For many in the Afghan capital, the only hope left lay in getting out.

Fida Mohammad, a 24-year-old dentist, was desperate to leave for the U.S. so he could earn enough money to repay his father’s debt of $13,000 for his elaborate marriage. He clung to the wheels of the departing US C-17 aircraft on Aug. 16 and died.

Zaki Anwari, a 17-year-old footballer, ran to get on the plane. He dreamed only of football, and believed his dream could not come true in Afghanistan. He was run over by the C-17.

Now the future in Afghanistan is even more uncertain. Scores of people line up outside the banks to try to get their money out. Hospitals are short of medicine. The Taliban hardliners seem to have the upper hand, at least in the short term.

Afghans are left to face the fact that the entire world came to their country in 2001 and spent billions, and still couldn’t bring them prosperity or even the beginnings of prosperity. That alone has deeply eroded hope for the future.

I leave Afghanistan with mixed feelings, sad to see how its hope has been destroyed but still deeply moved by its 38 million people. The Afghans I met sincerely loved their country, even if it is now led by elderly men driven by tribal traditions offensive to a world that I am not sure ever really understood Afghanistan.

Most certainly, though, I will be back.

Hope and despair: Kathy Gannon on 35 years in Afghanistan
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Donors’ dilemma: How to provide aid to a country whose government you do not recognise

July 6, 2022

Roxanna Shapour

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It has been ten months since the Taleban took control of Afghanistan, setting off economic collapse on an unprecedented scale that has seen millions of Afghans fall into extreme poverty. While the Taleban continue to snub calls from Western capitals to respect human rights, including the rights of Afghan girls and women, donor countries have tried to navigate the myriad difficult choices surrounding providing aid beyond the strictly humanitarian for Afghanistan. In this report, AAN’s Roxanna Shapour looks at how engagement between donors and the Taleban has gone so far, what the future of aid to Afghanistan might look like, how donors might bridge the distance between their demands and the Taleban’s increasing restrictions, and what mechanisms exist that might allow for non-humanitarian assistance.
 

When the last president of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, fled the country on 15 August 2022, his departure paved the way for Taleban fighters to enter Kabul in their final push to take power (see AAN reporting here, here and here). Afghanistan’s international partners had been supporting the so-called intra-Afghan peace talks in the Qatari capital Doha, which had been aimed, supposedly, at ending the conflict and reaching a political settlement. In the wake of the United States-led withdrawal that had hastened the fall of the Republic and the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taleban, the flow of international funds to Afghanistan stopped overnight. Those funds had constituted the mainstay of the Afghan state and economy for two decades, providing the bulk of government spending and more than 40 per cent of GDP. They had also, ultimately, created an extremely dysfunctional economy: foreign funds discouraged domestic production and encouraged services, construction and imports, including subsidising an extreme trade deficit that enabled Afghanistan to import staple food items, medicines and fuel while exporting relatively little. [1] With the Taleban takeover, wide-ranging sanctions that had been in place against the Taleban (US) or individual Taleban members (United Nations) were suddenly applied to the whole country. Although they have subsequently been watered down, the fear of sanctions is still making international banks averse to dealing with non-governmental organisations (NGOs), businesses and individuals in Afghanistan.

In the days that followed the Taleban’s seizure of power, Afghanistan’s economy barrelled toward collapse, prompting concerns that the country was on the brink of the worst humanitarian crisis in modern times (see media reporting here). In response, a 13 September 2021 pledging conference convened in Geneva by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres raised USD 1.2 billion for humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan (doubling the USD 600 million requested in a flash appeal by the UN) and on 12 October, members of the G20 group of major economies held a virtual conference and agreed to provide humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, with the European Union pledging one billion euros.

As the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan intensified, donor countries strengthened their efforts to deliver urgent humanitarian assistance to millions of Afghans living in terrible circumstances, including via an international donor conference on 31 March 2022. They were also keenly aware that humanitarian aid was not a solution to the country’s collapsed economy, and that it would not help Afghans regain lost ground and end the spiralling cycle of immiseration that has gripped nearly the entire Afghan population since the collapse of the Republic.

In the face of the Afghan population’s growing needs, Western capitals are grappling with whether and how to engage with a government that took power by force and has used violence against protesters and the media, curbed women’s freedoms and clamped down on civil rights. Their initial guarded optimism that positive engagement with the Emirate would yield concessions in exchange for funding and technical support has foundered, and it is fair to say that since 15 August, donor nations have come to realise that their counterparts are seemingly indifferent and inflexible, both ruthless and vulnerable. The Taleban have shown little inclination to take note of the concerns raised by donors and others, including those of their neighbours. [2] Those concerns were summed up in United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 2596, adopted on 17 September 2021, which called for:

  • the establishment of an inclusive and representative government;
  • the full, equal and meaningful participation of women, and upholding human rights, including for women, children and minorities;
  • full, safe and unhindered humanitarian access for United Nations humanitarian agencies and other humanitarian actors to deliver humanitarian assistance; and
  • combating terrorism in Afghanistan and ensuring that Afghan soil would not be used as a staging ground by terrorists. [3]

Afghanistan’s international partners had hoped that positive engagement with the Taleban with promises of aid could incentivise the group to moderate its policies, without broaching the subject of international recognition explicitly. The Taleban have repeatedly called for this, including their leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, who called for formal recognition in his Eid ul-Fitr message on 1 May 2022. The call for international recognition was highlighted in the closing statement of a gathering of more than 4,000 ulema (religious leaders) and elders which was held in Kabul on 29 June to 2 July 2022. The statement, however, made no reference to reopening girls’ schools (see media reports here and here). Until now, there have been no concessions. Rather, the harsh treatment of dissent has continued and further restrictions have been ordered, especially on the lives of women and girls, including the decision to keep schools for older girls closed. A signal that donors may be rethinking their positive engagement policy came on 21 June, with a decision by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to revoke an international travel ban waiver for two Taleban officials (Deputy Minister of Education Said Ahmad Shahidkhel and Minister of Higher Education Abdul Baqi Basir Awal Shah) (see UN update), presumably over the Taleban’s girls’ school policy. [4]

Donors face an apparently intractable quandary – how to support poor Afghans without sustaining the Taleban regime in power, how to move beyond humanitarian aid effectively and fairly without bolstering Taleban government institutions and how to engage with a government that is so resistant to acting on their concerns. At the same time, Western capitals also fear that the country could be plunged into chaos and further misery if the Emirate collapsed.

Nine months after the Taleban announced their interim administration, AAN thought it would be useful to take a closer look at the workings of international aid flows to Afghanistan. We provide an overview of donor funding committed to Afghanistan so far and existing platforms for delivering humanitarian and development assistance in the future. We consider the complexities of balancing engagement with the Taleban against donor priorities and the needs of the people of Afghanistan. We also try to bring together relevant data and information on the various appeals, funds and approaches in one place. The structure of the report is as follows:

Initial approaches to aid

  • Two different donor approaches: a positive engagement strategy saw senior Taleban officials invited to an international conference in Oslo is compared to not inviting them to the London pledging conference in an attempt to cast humanitarian aid as apolitical.
  • Pledges in London fall short of needs: how the Taleban closing girls’ schools dampened the donors’ goodwill and appeared to trigger a rethinking in donors’ approaches to engaging with the Taleban.
  • An update on humanitarian aid flows: assistance has been a lifeline to many Afghans, while not resolving acute and ongoing food insecurity. Some aid organisations have had to scale back their activities, mostly as a result of funding shortfalls and problems with getting funds into Afghanistan.

Going beyond humanitarian aid

  • ‘Humanitarian plus’: how bringing humanitarian and development assistance under one umbrella could support at least some activities beyond the strictly humanitarian.
  • The UN takes centre stage on international aid: the reluctance of donors to work directly with the Taleban authorities means the UN has become the key mechanism for disbursing and managing not only humanitarian aid, but also any future development support.
  • The Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund: the World Bank launches its ‘expanded 2.0 approach’ with USD 1 billion to support health, agriculture and livelihoods, but the education project is on hold pending the reopening of girls’ secondary schools.
  • Taleban finances: the Taleban have announced a national budget for the current financial year and domestic revenues have been impressive. However, if donors pay for some basic services, how will the Emirate use the revenues it has saved?
  • Creating ‘firewalls’: donors are taking care not to create the appearance that they, or the organisations they fund, are ‘working with the Taleban’ but can donor assistance ever sidestep the de facto authorities of a country?
  • The prospects for future aid for Afghanistan: quandaries remain, as do mixed messages from donors reflecting real dilemmas about the complexities of responding to Afghanistan’s humanitarian and economic crises in the face of conflicting needs and political red lines.

We start with a section which looks at two very different approaches from Afghanistan’s erstwhile international partners: engaging with the Taleban politically, as seen at the Oslo conference of January 2022, and not even inviting the Taleban to the table, as seen in the donor pledging conference in March.

The Oslo conference in January 2022

It was in the spirit of positive engagement that the government of Norway invited the Taleban to take part in a three-day event in Oslo on 23-24 January 2022. The invitation came on the heels of a hastily put together one-day economic conference in Kabul on 19 January, which the Taleban hoped to use to kick-start their move to woo international funding to Afghanistan.

A 15-member Taleban delegation was flown to Norway on a private jet to participate in face-to-face, behind-closed-doors meetings with a delegation of Afghan civil society, including human rights and women’s rights activists held on the first day. “It was interesting,” one of the civil society delegates told AAN, “the first time the Taleban had agreed to sit down with other Afghans in a neutral location.” His delegation had prepared a position paper, the ‘Oslo Road Map’, on how to achieve peace in Afghanistan. Only after the Taleban had spoken to their compatriots did they meet diplomats and Special Representatives on Afghanistan from the European Union, US, UK, France, Italy and Norway the following day. The third day was given over to what AP reported as “bilateral [meetings], involving all parties including independent humanitarian organizations.”

The Taleban and civil society delegations issued a joint statement, affirming that the only solution for Afghanistan’s problems was “mutual understanding, dialogue and cooperation,” that Afghanistan “is the common home of all Afghans,” and stressing the “need to work together for better political, economic and security outcomes in the country” (statement supplied by one of the delegates; translation by AAN). Western countries also issued a statement saying they had “focused on the urgency in addressing the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan” and on human rights, and urged the Taleban “to do more to stop arbitrary detentions (including recent detentions of women’s rights activists), forced disappearances, media crackdowns, extra-judicial killings, torture and prohibitions on women and girls’ education, employment and freedom to travel without a male escort.” Emphasising the importance of the subject, the statement repeated the need for all girls to be free to go to school.

Member of the Taleban delegation Shafiullah Azam told the Associated Press that the meetings with Western officials were “a step to legitimize (the) Afghan government,” and that “this type of invitation and communication will help (the) European community, (the) US or many other countries to erase the wrong picture of the Afghan government.” In response, Western envoys said in their statement that they had “made clear that their meetings with the Taliban in no way implied any sense of official recognition or legitimization of the interim government announced by the Taliban in September 2021.” One of the civil society activists described the meeting as a “very small step forward, a long way from a ‘process’.” There was some talk of a follow-up, but this has not happened.

There was criticism of Oslo from those opposed to treating the Taleban in any way as a legitimate government. As we will see, the Taleban are still citing Oslo as evidence that they are on the path to recognition.

The alternative approach, of not inviting the Taleban, was taken at a pledging conference in March 2022.

The London pledging conference

The pledging conference for Afghanistan held on 31 March, co-hosted by the United Kingdom, Germany, Qatar and the United Nations and referred to in short-hand as the ‘London conference’, even though it was held online, was a very different event. The Taleban were not invited and would not be involved in spending the funds raised. A humanitarian focus allowed donors to cast the fund-raising effort as apolitical and uncontroversial (see this AAN report). At the same time, a strong show of financial support for Afghanistan was meant to signal to the Taleban that donors had not left the country behind and held out the promise of additional funding beyond humanitarian assistance should the Taleban take steps to address the donors’ concerns.

The organisers issued a carefully crafted list of 11 key messages designed to garner donor support not only for the UN’s Humanitarian Response Plan but also for the UNHCR’s refugee response plan and for development projects, which would need to come into play to provide long-term solutions. The messages focused attention on such key issues as the need to restart Afghanistan’s economy and get the stalled banking sector going, and raised the alarm on reported Taleban attempts to interfere with the delivery of aid and hinder the activities of female aid workers. Finally, the organisers said the Taleban’s decision to renege on their promise to re-open girls’ secondary schools was “a major setback” and urged the Taleban to honour their pledge to allow education for all (more on this later).

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and British Foreign Minister Liz Truss opened the conference and called on donors to dig deep into their pockets to support the people of Afghanistan. “Wealthy powerful countries cannot ignore the consequences of their decisions on the most vulnerable, said Guterres. He also highlighted the devastating consequences of the decision by donors to halt the flow of development funding to Afghanistan and the decision by the United States to freeze nine billion dollars in Afghan assets, and called on donors to find ways for “the Afghan economy to breathe and the Afghan people to eat.”

The first step in any meaningful humanitarian response must be to halt the death spiral of the Afghan economy. Without that, even the best funded and most effective aid operation will not save the people of Afghanistan from an unimaginable future.

Participating in the pledging conference were 41 countries and international organisations. 15 countries pledged USD 2.4 billion in humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan in the current year (see details of the conference here and summary of pledges here). The sum fell short of the United Nations’ USD 4.4 billion target, but was still sizeable.

For the most part, except for co-host Qatar (USD 25 million), Kuwait (USD 10 million) and Turkey (USD 5 million), Muslim-majority countries who participated in the conference did not pledge cash contributions to the UN appeal, opting instead to give either in-kind humanitarian support such as food aid, or donate to the newly established Afghanistan Humanitarian Trust Fund (AHTF), which is sponsored by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and will be administered by the Islamic Development Bank (further details about this initiative have, so far, not been released).

There were also pledges from ‘non-traditional donors,’ for example Brazil (USD 50 thousand), Kazakhstan (USD 70 thousand), and Guyana (USD 10 thousand). In addition, the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) also announced a pledge of USD 300 million to support both the Humanitarian Response Plan and the UN’s Transitional Engagement Framework for Afghanistan, which calls for 4.4 billion humanitarian and USD 3.4 billion for “essential services.”

How Taleban stopping girls going to school discouraged donors

Pledges at the conference fell well short of the USD 4.4 billion the UN had asked for. What derailed the funding drive appeared to be the decision taken, reportedly at a leadership meeting in Kandahar on 23 March, to override the Ministry of Education’s plans to re-open girls’ secondary schools and instead keep them closed (see AAN report on the ban on older girls’ education here). This decision was made despite the demands of many Afghan citizens for their older daughters to be allowed to go to school and despite girls’ education being an apparent red line for donors. A UN official told The Guardian newspaper ahead of the conference that he feared “increasing Taliban repressive policies in Afghanistan” would provoke a backlash from donors and perhaps in anticipation of donors’ reticence to fully fund the humanitarian appeal, UN Secretary-General Guterres called on them not to use girls’ education “as a bargaining tool.” Those giving less than anticipated included the hosts, the UK, at least according to former international development secretary Andrew Mitchell, who criticised the UK’s pledge of GBP 286 million [USD 374.35 million], saying “the UK traditionally would have offered £325m [USD 425.58 million], or 10% of the target.” [5]

The Taleban’s decision to keep older girls out of school also laid waste to donors’ optimism that their constructive engagement would deliver the sort of results that could be built upon to gain further concessions and improve relationships with the Kabul administration. It left Western officials wondering whether their particular Taleban interlocutors had any sway over decision-making, or if the more hardline conservatives in Kandahar who do not generally meet Westerners would always trump more progressive voices within the movement. The decision on girls’ schools appeared to trigger a rethinking in donors’ approaches to engaging with the Taleban: “The recent decision of the Taleban leadership, “said Norway’s Foreign Minister, Anniken Huitfeldt, “to continue to ban girls from secondary education is deeply disappointing. It underscores the wisdom in judging them by their actions and not by their words.”

The conference highlighted how, even though the aim was to attract humanitarian aid only, politics and in particular Taleban actions on the ground, affected donors’ enthusiasm to help – in this case, probably reducing the amount pledged. The event underscored the donors’ dilemma: how, even when working to provide supposedly non-political aid, to hold fast to their own principles and priorities in the face of Taleban politics that promote the polar opposite.

It also revealed donors’ relative lack of leverage, eliciting a rethinking of their ambitions to use ‘constructive engagement’ to influence Taleban policy and practice in the long term. “We must be realistic,” said Huitfeldt “about what can be achieved through dialogue, but without engagement, we lose our ability to influence.” She also underscored that, “This engagement does not imply recognition.”

An update on humanitarian aid flows

As donors wrestled over how to encourage the Taleban to respect human and women’s rights, deal with the terrorist groups on Afghan soil and make their administration inclusive and representative, humanitarian aid flowed into the country. The aid has undoubtedly been a lifeline to millions of Afghans. The latest Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) report, a global standard for assessing food insecurity issued in May 2022, noted a small reduction in the number of food-insecure Afghans and credited scaled-up food distributions as the main reason for this. Even so, the report put the number of people facing ‘crisis’ or ‘emergency’ levels of food insecurity (IPC Phases 3 or 4) in the lean season, between March and May 2022, at 20 million, or nearly half the population. It also found one area of Ghor where 20,000 people were facing famine (IPC Phase 5). This is the first time the IPC has ever found conditions to be ‘catastrophic’ in Afghanistan. [6]

Despite problems with funding, both a shortfall in the amount actually arriving in UN accounts and with getting funds into Afghanistan given the ongoing problems with the banking sector, humanitarian aid has saved many Afghans from an even worse winter. Those problems forced some humanitarian actors, notably the World Food Programme (WFP), to scale back their plans (see AAN report here). The IPC report said that lack of sufficient funding had pushed humanitarian efforts to breaking point, with a forced reduction in food rations expected “from 38% of the population receiving on average two thirds food ration in the current period, to 8% in the June-November projection due to lack of funding.”

According to the UN’s Financial Tracking Service (FTS), only USD 1.5 billion, or 64 per cent of the USD 2.4 billion pledged at the London conference, has been received or committed. In other words, nearly 36 per cent of the aid pledged by donors has yet to be paid into humanitarian accounts. Given that pledges had not matched the funding requested in the Humanitarian Response Plan, overall the shortfall between plan and funding received stands at USD 2.9 billion, or 66 per cent.

The other problem with funding – getting money into Afghanistan in the first place – is a knock-on effect of another facet of international policy on Afghanistan – the banking restrictions that stem from sanctions. Getting cash to Kabul and from there to the provinces is arduous and costly. There have been several well-publicised UN deliveries of cash to Afghanistan using a ‘humanitarian air bridge’ – nearly USD 900 million so far – (see, for example, media reports here and here). Flying consignments of cash into the country on charter flights and then getting money from Kabul to the provinces is unsustainable and saps vast sums away from beneficiaries. Rather, the logistics companies who help deliver consignments of cash to Afghanistan and the hawaladars (money exchangers) that provide the service inside the country are enriched. And despite those flights, humanitarian organisations continue to raise the alarm about how the lack of liquidity is hampering their ability to deliver assistance to the most vulnerable.

One temporary solution would be a plan spearheaded by the UN and the World Bank, called the Humanitarian Exchange Facility (see Box 4 in this World Bank report). The Humanitarian Exchange Facility would function as a currency clearinghouse for Afghanistan’s private sector to deposit afghanis (Afghanistan’s local currency) into dedicated accounts at Afghan banks, allowing the UN and humanitarian organisations to have access to funds inside the country; in exchange, participating Afghan businesses would receive an equivalent amount in US dollars abroad to pay their foreign suppliers and creditors. If operationalised, the Humanitarian Exchange Facility would solve the immediate liquidity problems of humanitarian organisations and allow the UN and NGOs to deliver assistance to the Afghan population.

However, such a mechanism has inherent risks, especially in the long term, when it would likely further erode the capacity of Afghanistan’s central bank and prevent it from fulfilling its role as the country’s independent monetary regulator. It could also distort the already ailing Afghan economy by increasing demand for the afghani, lead to a flight of capital and open fresh avenues for graft –potentially from all sides. [7] (See a recent International Rescue Committee report looking at options here).

Beyond Humanitarian aid

There is a consensus that humanitarian assistance has been an indispensable stop-gap measure to avert a deepening humanitarian crisis in the country. Since the March summit, donors also appear unanimous in their position that humanitarian assistance alone is not enough to address the growing humanitarian crisis and that stemming humanitarian needs in the future will require addressing the country’s collapsed economy. All indications are that despite the Taleban’s contrary policies, harsh treatment of dissent and increasing restrictions on women, donor countries are still prepared to commit at least some funding to support activities beyond the strictly humanitarian.

One way donors could fund the delivery of basic services, ie beyond strictly lifesaving aid, is what is called ‘humanitarian plus’. It would expand donor assistance from immediate lifesaving support to include funding for other services, which are seen as essential, but are classed as development, for example teachers’ salaries, support to agriculture, infrastructure such as energy and banking, and national-level community-led structures, such as the Community Development Councils (CDCs), [8] to keep them from collapsing. As with humanitarian assistance, donors want to continue ensuring their money does not pass through Taleban hands. Largely, plans are settling on an approach which would use UN agencies to spend multilateral funds managed by the World Bank for programmes which are implemented by NGOs and monitored by third parties.

Paving the way for humanitarian plus assistance to begin was the major waiver to US sanctions, General License 19, issued by the US Department of Treasury in December 2021. It authorised:

All transactions and activities involving the Taliban or the Haqqani Network, that are ordinarily incident and necessary to the following activities by nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), subject to certain conditions: humanitarian projects to meet basic human needs; activities to support rule of law, citizen participation, government accountability and transparency, human rights and fundamental freedoms, access to information, and civil society development projects; education; non-commercial development projects directly benefitting the Afghan people; and environmental and natural resource protection.

UN agencies continue to be the donors’ preferred vehicle for delivering aid, both humanitarian and for essential services. This stands in sharp contrast to their approach under the Republic when they provided a sizable portion of aid funding directly as on-budget support through the national budget to line ministries. Going through the UN encourages risk-averse donors to fund various critical sectors as it minimises the possibility that funds might end up in Taleban hands down to what donors might consider an acceptable level of risk.

Humanitarian plus also has the potential to bring the two strands of international aid (humanitarian and development) under one umbrella and enable, in theory, joint planning, better-coordinated implementation, and more streamlined funding flows. This is tricky for those donors who have separate instruments for humanitarian and development financing – for example, the European Commission has two separate agencies for humanitarian and development funding, with distinct portfolios and funding instruments, and with minimal overlap – so integration is not necessarily easy or straightforward. Nevertheless, particularly in crises, there is now a global momentum towards donors providing multi-year support through multilateral trust funds. In Yemen, for example, the humanitarian plus approach is enabling donors to channel funds through the World Bank for a series of programmes administered by UN agencies, and local organisations to pay health workers’ salaries and provide fuel supplies for hospitals and emergency nutrition support. In Afghanistan, as well, the way ahead appears to be World Bank-managed multilateral trust funds with programmes implemented by UN agencies via NGOs.

In the following sections, we look at the benefits, costs and risks of such a scheme, which aims to satisfy donors’ wishes to restart the delivery of non-humanitarian aid to Afghanistan without crossing the red line of working with the Taleban administration.

The United Nations as the main platform for delivering assistance

The reluctance of donors to work with the Taleban authorities has meant the UN has become, by default, the most important international aid actor operating on the ground in Afghanistan. While some major international and regional powers, including Russia, China, Turkey, Pakistan and Iran, have embassies open in Kabul, among Western players, only the EU has chosen to re-establish a physical presence in Kabul and even that is restricted to a humanitarian mission only. This means that the UN – its agencies, funds and programmes, operating in the country on their own or through implementing partners – has become the key mechanism for implementing humanitarian aid and would be also for any future development support through various multilateral trust funds.

The UN vision of humanitarian plus was laid out in its Transitional Engagement Framework (TEF). Launched by UNAMA in January 2022, the 20-page framework is billed as “the overarching strategic planning document for the UN system’s assistance in 2022.” In other words, it is the UN’s joint appeal for funding for both humanitarian and development activities. It has three strategic objectives/outcomes:

  1. Provide lifesaving assistance;
  2. Sustain essential services;
  3. Preserve social investments and community-level systems essential to meeting basic human needs.

In addition to the USD 4.4 billion for humanitarian assistance (outcome one), the TEF envisions a further requirement of USD 3.7 billion for development support (outcomes two and three) bringing the total to USD 8 billion. That is far more than the last budget of the Republic, which was USD 6.14 billion and paid for all government spending, including the spending on the military, security and police.

As AAN discussed in its report in advance of the London pledging conference, the Transitional Engagement Framework is ambitious in its aspirations, but surprisingly scant on data, detail, analysis and strategic priorities. This is especially so given the political realities on the ground and the short timeframe for its implementation – just one year.

The TEF offers three outcomes if its planned activities are fully implemented (ie fully funded) – save lives, sustain essential services and preserve community systems – but does little to flesh out what this would mean. For example, the “outcome funding matrix” section lists “indicative activities” organised by outcome but not prioritised, nor do they give details such as the number of beneficiaries to be reached or how each activity is to be designed and implemented. There are no details about how, or indeed if, the planned programmes will interact with existing government structures, notably the technical line ministries such as health or agriculture. Will donors’ intentions to ‘firewall’ their funds mean that the technical capacities of these institutions, which had been honed with donor support over the past two decades, be further eroded?

In light of donor intentions to tap the UN as the primary vehicle for delivering humanitarian plus assistance to Afghanistan, the development section of the framework would need far more detailed planning to be helpful, similar to the response plan developed in January 2022 for humanitarian action. Humanitarian planning and action already benefits greatly from a well-established and robust coordination architecture, known as the ‘cluster system’, which allows aid organisations to have a joined-up approach to assistance, determine needs and gaps, harmonise plans and avoid duplication in particular ‘clusters’, eg the health cluster, the education cluster. It would be useful for development organisations to clarify if they intend to establish a similar coordination mechanism and, if not, how they intend to harmonise activities for outcomes 2 and 3.

As for how to fund development in Afghanistan, it seems the preferred option are multilateral funding mechanisms, such as the World Bank-administered Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF). These would allow aid organisations to develop comprehensive and sustainable multi-year plans and donors to provide off-budget support to essential non-humanitarian activities, although there are also costs and risks to this approach.

What are multilateral funds?

Multilateral funds (or pooled funds) enable donor countries to allocate humanitarian funds or Official Development Assistance (ODA) to an organisation such as the World Bank or a United Nations agency, which then uses those funds to finance programmes and projects in a beneficiary country. As the name suggests, multilateral funds pool donor contributions into a unified core budget, which means that particular donors cannot be identified as supporting a particular initiative or programme. Furthermore, once contributions have been made, donors have little control over how the multilateral fund uses their money. Historically, this has made multilateral funds less attractive to donors who prefer to provide aid bilaterally, when a state makes aid contributions directly to another state, which allows donors to have greater control and flexibility over their allocations and be identified as the country that is supporting a particular project. In recent years, however, multilateral funds have adapted by accepting non-core contributions that allow donors to exert greater control over how their aid is spent, for example, by making contributions earmarked for specific projects. As a result, multilateral funds are fast gaining ground as practicable instruments for delivering development aid, particularly in complex environments where bilateral mechanisms are not feasible, such as the Taleban-controlled Afghanistan.

There are currently five multilateral funds for Afghanistan:

Afghanistan Humanitarian Fund (AHF) was established in 2014 and is one of UNOCHA’s country-based pooled funds (CBPFs) to facilitate a rapid response to the most critical humanitarian needs under the supervision of the UN Humanitarian Coordinator. The AHF currently has a balance of USD 368.8 million in available funding.

Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF) was established by donors as the platform to pool resources and coordinate support for the reconstruction of Afghanistan in 2002 and appears to be the primary vehicle slated for delivering non-humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan. Its balance currently stands at USD 1.2 billion, with plans to commit or disburse all available funds by the end of 2022, according to the ARTF team speaking to AAN on 4 July 2022.

Special Trust Fund for Afghanistan (STFA) is the UN’s inter-agency fund for addressing economic instability using the Area-based Approach for Development Emergency Initiatives (ABADEI), which aims to support local economies (humanitarian plus). In October 2021, STFA announced a USD 667 million “people’s economy fund” that would see UNDP “tap into donations frozen since the Taliban takeover in August” to support local-level economic initiatives, such as grants to collapsing micro-businesses, short-term cash for work schemes for the unemployed, and temporary basic income for the disabled, elderly and the most vulnerable (see here and here). STFA currently has a balance of USD 98.7 million in available funding. In addition, the ARTF will provide USD 265 million to UNDP’s ABADEI as part of its Afghanistan Community Resilience and Livelihoods Project.

Afghanistan Infrastructure Trust Fund (AITF) was established in 2010 by the Asian Development Bank to finance infrastructure investments, including transport links, energy facilities, irrigation systems, mineral resources and the private sector. The fund, which was supported by Germany, Japan, the NATO ANA Trust Fund, the United Kingdom and the United States, suspended its activities on 15 August 2022. [9]

Afghanistan Humanitarian Trust Fund (AHTF) was launched on 21 March 2022 by the 57-nation Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and the Islamic Development Bank. There is no information on the total funding available or the activities of this newly established fund.

Of all these trust funds, the World Bank-administered ARTF will, it seems, be the primary platform for any eventual development funding for Afghanistan.

The ARTF – potentials and challenges

Following the Taleban takeover on 15 August 2021, the World Bank halted all its activities, including the ARTF. On 1 March 2022, the World Bank Board of Executive Directors approved something of a resumption of its activities, an “expanded approach” that cleared the way for one billion dollars from the ARTF to be paid out in grants to UN agencies and international NGOs. This was in addition to USD 280 million in humanitarian funding (USD 100 million to UNICEF and USD 180 million to WFP) which had already been paid out of the fund in December 2021. All planned ARTF expenditure will be off-budget and outside the control of the Taleban’s de facto administration. The World Bank’s expanded approach (Approach 2.0) is “designed to be flexible and adaptive, recognizing that the situation on the ground remains fluid,” with an initially planned investment of USD 600 million for four projects in education, health, agriculture and community livelihoods.

At the end of March, after the Taleban reneged on their promise to re-open girls’ secondary schools, the Bank put four planned projects on hold, citing concerns over the ban on girls attending high school. It said that ARTF projects would be submitted for donor approval “when the World Bank and international partners have a better understanding of the situation and confidence that the goals of the projects can be met” (see Reuters report here).

On 19 April, Reuters reported that the World Bank would press on with three of the four projects focused on health, agriculture and livelihoods with a total value of USD 450 million, but would hold back on plans to allocate some USD 150 million for education projects, presumably until girls’ secondary schools were re-opened. The particulars of the decision were later clarified when the Bank announced its detailed plans for ARTF-supported activities totalling USD 793 million through the three projects:

The Afghanistan Emergency Food Security Project will support smallholder farmers, with the aim of reducing food insecurity for some 300,000 households in the November 2022 and another 300,000 households during the March to November 2023 planting seasons, including people with disabilities or chronic illness and female-headed households. 150,000 women will be trained, links to local markets will facilitate the sale of surpluses of wheat and vegetables, and watershed management systems will improve soil and water conservation in 137,000 hectares of farmland. The total value of this project, which will be implemented by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), is USD 195 million.

The Afghanistan Community Resilience and Livelihoods Project will work with Community Development Councils (CDCs) to provideincome opportunities for one million households in 6,450 rural communities as well as in the cities of Bamyan, Herat, Jalalabad, Kabul, Kandahar, Khost, Kunduz and Mazar-e Sharif. In addition, an estimated 9.3 million people in the same areas will benefit from basic utilities and services such as clean water, sanitation, and road rehabilitation. This project, with a total value of USD 265 million, will be implemented through the UNDP’s ABADEI programme.

The Afghanistan Health Emergency Response Project will provide basic health, nutrition, and COVID-19 services in more than 2,300 health facilities. This project will support the ARTF-funded Sehatmandi programme that contracts out virtually all basic and essential health services to NGOs. The total value of this project will be USD 333 million, including 19 million from the World Bank’s Global Financing Facility (GFF).

It can be assumed that the remainder of the one billion dollar allocation, which amounts to USD 207 million, was earmarked for education (the fourth project) and is presumably on hold pending the re-opening of girls’ secondary schools.

While the ARTF is viewed as the most appropriate venue for supporting humanitarian plus initiatives, at least for now, concerns over its management, highlighted in several reports by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), persist. SIGAR first raised concerns about the fund in a 2011 audit report when it noted that reviews of ARTF funding for the Afghan government’s operating budget had been limited to financial reviews and audits rather than performance audits that would have allowed the ARTF team to examine and report on the efficiency and effectiveness of ARTF funding. It also reported that monitors had not made site visits to ARTF-funded programmes outside Kabul since March 2009 and between March 2008 and March 2009 monitors had only visited 11 out of 34 provinces. SIGAR recommended improvements to how the ARTF disseminates its reports on results and outcomes to ensure that all donors had access to the information.

Seven years later, in its April 2018 audit report of the ARTF, SIGAR noted that, while steps had been taken to address the issues raised in its earlier report, “limitations remain[ed]” that put ARTF funds at “risk of being spent improperly.” It said: “The World Bank needs to improve how it monitors implementation, shares information, and determines the impact of donor contributions.” The report said it had not been possible for SIGAR to fully assess the extent of monitoring and reporting on the performance of six major ARTF investment projects worth USD 2.25 billion “because the Bank limits transparency on records,” adding that the World Bank lacked the tools to measure performance and could not determine whether these projects were meeting their objectives. SIGAR made five recommendations to address these issues:

(1) expand the scope of the Bank’s field monitoring,

(2) improve public transparency and donor access to information,

(3) evaluate the performance of third-party monitors,

(4) ensure the Bank adheres to its own performance management guidance, and

(5) allow donors more flexibility in holding the Bank and the Afghan government accountable for ARTF implementation. [10]

SIGAR released its latest ARTF evaluation report in March 2022, although much of the material was drawn from before the fall of Kabul. SIGAR found that the World Bank had taken steps to improve its monitoring and oversight of ARTF-funded projects, but had failed to make significant headway in ensuring physical verifications, and independent performance reviews of third-party monitors had been infrequent; gaps and delays in reporting had left donors unable to make informed decisions. SIGAR also found that the issues it had raised in its 2018 report concerning transparency in reporting had not been fully addressed and that donors were still not getting complete access to documents and reports in a timely manner, which meant that the reports, when and if they came, were not useful to donors for planning purposes. Importantly, SIGAR found that “the Bank still did not adhere to its own performance measurement guidance,” nor to its own policy of providing donors and the public access to ARTF records.

Two new issues were identified in the 2022 report: first, the World Bank told SIGAR that frequent turnovers among donor staff meant counterparts often did not understand how the ARTF worked. In response, the Bank had developed an ‘ARTF 101’ briefing manual for new donor staff. Second, several donors had raised concerns that the ARTF team was too small to properly manage the demands of its extensive portfolio.

Monitoring and oversight of ARTF programmes should be easier now that the conflict has largely ended and access to the field is easier. However, the World Bank has no plans to return an in-country team to Kabul in the foreseeable future. Rather, teams stationed in Islamabad and Dushanbe will oversee ARTF-funded programmes remotely, at least for the time being. According to the ARTF team, the World Bank hopes to re-open its office in Afghanistan, when conditions on the ground allow it, with World Bank staff visiting Kabul twice each month to assess the situation.

The plan, then, is for the World Bank to hold the purse strings for the lion’s share of non-humanitarian financing, ie the ARTF, with the exception of any non-ARTF funding that might be allocated to the UN’s inter-agency fund for addressing economic instability, the Special Trust Fund for Afghanistan. UN agencies, meanwhile, will take centre stage as the primary implementers of donors’ limited development agenda in Afghanistan. NGOs will carry out much of the actual work, as contracted by UN agencies. The World Bank is also looking into the possibility of providing funding to International NGOs in the future.

In this light, the UN’s aspirational Transitional Engagement Framework, if it is to be at all useful, would have to be developed into a robust multi-year roadmap, with detailed work plans and a clear exit strategy, and with the World Bank taking the lead in creating sustainable policies and plans while the UN takes responsibility for implementation, ensuring technical standards and continued engagement with the de facto authorities. It is difficult to imagine such a mammoth undertaking being carried out without the benefit of qualified World Bank staff on the ground in Afghanistan who could leverage the funds and their associated activities to help the economy, keep an eye on macroeconomic stability, coordinate activities with the various UN entities and implementing NGOs and monitor progress on the ground and in real-time.

At the same time, there are also questions about the UN’s capacity to implement such a vast undertaking effectively, and about who will ensure the UN’s work is monitored and evaluated. Plans, as they currently stand, are for ARTF funds to be managed using what the World Bank calls a “Recipient executed modality,” which gives the Bank great control and oversight of ARTF-funded activities. In other words, the World Bank will design ARTF-funded UN-led programmes and projects and take on a more expansive supervisory role and ensure the efficiency and efficacy of ARTF-funded, UN-led activities through third-party monitors. This is the same third-party monitoring arrangement that SIGAR repeatedly described as deficient. Moreover, monitoring will be even more difficult now that the World Bank has no functional presence in Afghanistan, but will be working remotely from Pakistan and Tajikistan. It is perhaps telling, that, in 2022, SIGAR made no recommendations for ARTF, citing an uncertain future for USAID funding of ARTF and “because we previously made recommendations that, if addressed, would mitigate the issues we identify herein.”

The World Bank’s response to SIGAR’s 2022 report (AAN has seen a copy) summarises 90 “technical comments” from an earlier response to the draft report which had been sent to the Bank for review, as is customary, as well as more than 50 additional comments. In the letter, the Bank noted that it had “substantially expanded donors’ access to information about the ARTF,” including hiring new staff to provide weekly updates and enhance donors’ access to information. The ARTF website was also re-designed to allow better access to a library of nearly 700 documents. The response also addressed issues raised in SIGAR’s report concerning the ARTF third-party monitoring arrangement. It noted that according to an independent evaluation carried out during SIGAR’s review period: both the former Monitoring Agent and the Supervisory Agent performed well and delivered their contractual requirements. The response went on to say donors and the former government were generally happy with the monitors’ work and found their reports useful.

An additional cause for concern is the cost of setting up such a system parallel to government, with its own donor-driven financial institutions such as the Humanitarian Exchange Facility. How much of the aid will actually reach beneficiaries and how much will go to headquarters and in high salaries paid to internationals and Afghans? The past record shows that we are likely to see Afghan professionals – teachers, doctors and nurses – drawn by higher wages into jobs below their expertise, such as working as translators, drivers and guards at the UN and international aid agencies. Finally, what efforts will be made to include the voice and the will of the Afghan people in policies and planning for future development assistance. If the ultimate goal is to help Afghanistan get back on its feet and end the cycle of dependence on foreign aid, which is at any rate unsustainable at its current levels, then direct engagement with the Afghan people should be a starting point.

Who pays for what

A fundamental fear for donors is over what incidental and indirect benefits will go to the Taleban as a result of their decision to embark on a humanitarian plus approach, in particular: If donors pick up the tab, at least partly, for education, health, agriculture and other sectors, how and on what will the Taleban administration spend the money they have saved? It is very difficult to answer this question because, up to now, the Taleban have not been transparent about the details of both their revenues and expenditure. While the pared-down but relatively detailed three-month budget for the end of 1400, the previous Afghan year – roughly January, February and March – signalled the Taleban’s intention to cover basic services, for example, by paying civil service salaries, the same cannot be said of their budget for the 1401 financial year (March 2022 to March 2023), which was announced, but not released, by Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Salam Hanafi at a 14 May press conference. Hanafi provided only overall figures for revenues and expenditure – Afs 231.4 billion (USD 2.6 billion) in expenditure against estimated domestic revenues of Afs 186.7 billion (USD 2.07 billion), and with no elaboration on how the Taleban intend to bridge the Afs 44 billion (USD 488.8 million) gap between proposed spending and expected revenues (see VOA report here).

Ongoing AAN research is looking at Taleban finances, both revenue collection and expenditure, but it is important to note, for now, that the Taleban have made budgetary allocations for recurring costs, such as salaries and electricity imports as well as some development activities, which indicates their fiscal capacity and readiness to meet the costs they have budgeted for. In the absence of a publicly available national budget, however, it is impossible for donors to have a detailed understanding of the funds committed to expenditure by the Taleban administration in the 1401 financial year. Such details would help donors direct their future financing to activities and sectors that have been left under or unfunded in the 1401 budget.

Can donor assistance ever sidestep the Taleban?

What to fund, however, is only one part of the complicated landscape donors are navigating in their attempts to provide aid to Afghans. As official recognition of the Taleban’s Emirate will not be happening anytime soon, and donors are taking care not to create the appearance that they, or the organisations they fund, are ‘working with the Taleban.’ They are also intent on providing only off-budget funding and putting in place ‘firewalls’ that should ensure they do not inadvertently run foul of sanctions, and that their funds do not end up in Taleban hands.

There can, however, never be an absolute ‘firewall’ between aid agencies and whoever controls territory: even humanitarian aid has to be delivered with the acquiescence, at the very least, of those in power. They may not give it. To take an example from the delivery of humanitarian aid in Afghanistan this year, the Taleban did move to try to influence and control aid distribution in Afghanistan in late March 2022, when the Taleban’s acting prime minister, Mullah Hasan Akhund signed an order directing provincial governors to interdict any aid distribution not agreed to in advance by the provincial Afghanistan National Disaster Management Authority (ANDMA). The decree, which AAN has seen a copy of, ratified a proposal for “aid distributions to be carried out by the provincial governors’ offices to stop arbitrary distributions and ensure that those in need receive aid in line with a suitable work plan.”

A 31 March Wall Street Journal report showed increasing attempts by the Taleban to interfere with aid distributions carried out by humanitarian organisations through a series of such formal and informal orders. While the US-based daily acknowledged that the enthusiasm of local authorities to interfere with aid distributions varied from province to province, it did highlight the case of Ghor’s provincial governor, Ahmad Shah Dindost, who detained several aid workers for two days after humanitarian NGOs rejected his demands that they hire staff selected by local authorities and “relinquish control of their funds and implement projects of the local government’s choice.” The governor accused the detained aid workers of corruption: “We have evidence of the involvement of several members of these agencies in moral, political and administrative corruption,” he told the Kabul-based Pajhwok news website. The aid workers were eventually released after “coordinated pressure” from NGOs in Kabul, and the governor’s plans were put on hold, at least for now.

This incident and anecdotal reports of irregularities in the beneficiary selection and aid distribution process, which were noted in AAN’s recent report on food aid, have highlighted that even with the best of intentions, successful delivery of assistance is not possible without engaging with the de facto authorities.

For donors who prefer the primary mechanism for aid delivery to be the UN and for UN agencies that, for the most part, rely on implementing partners (local and international NGOs) to execute projects on the ground, the threats of interference are complicating, but not altogether unanticipated. They necessitate engagement and negotiations with the Taleban administration. Best practice would be for these negotiations not to be left to individual implementing partners and their staff, nor should they be agreed upon on a case-by-case and location-by-location basis. The UN, as the lead entity, should take the principal role in negotiating national-level blanket agreements on the delivery of assistance, standard levels of basic services, non-interference in procurement and recruitment, access for all aid workers and the ability to monitor partner performance and results, which could empower implementing partners to deliver assistance to communities with minimal interference by local authorities.

So far, Taleban interference has been in the relatively straightforward, officially apolitical humanitarian response. Expecting the Taleban to allow donors and aid organisations to bypass their administration when aid programmes go beyond the humanitarian will be far more difficult. Yet that is the path that donors seem intent on pursuing because of the political difficulties in being seen to work with or support the Taleban.

The prospects for future aid for Afghanistan

As donors contemplate their future relationship with Afghanistan’s new rulers, mixed messages abound. On the one hand, donors continue to strongly condemn human rights violations perpetrated by the Taleban, especially those related to women’s rights, and present headway on this front as a precondition for continued engagement with the de facto administration. On the other hand, they stress the urgent need to galvanise the Afghan economy and help sustain important state institutions (see also this 17 May communiqué from the Foreign Ministers of the G7 countries here) and continue to press forward with the humanitarian plus agenda.

The World Bank’s vacillating position on the future of ARTF-funding is another example of how the donors’ equivocating attitudes is driving decisions. After many months, the World Bank finally resolved to move forward with plans to use the donor-supported ARTF to fund development projects, but its mercurial attitude could mean that politics and events on the ground might yet overtake the Bank’s intentions, prompting it to put its projects on hold once again.

Another example of mixed messaging is the UN Security Council issuing a press release on 24 May expressing “deep concern” over the growing erosion of respect for the human rights and fundamental freedoms of women and girls in Afghanistan, citing “deep concerns over the Taliban’s ban on girls attending high school,” while at the same time acknowledging the country’s economic difficulties and conceding that the banking and financial systems must be restored and “efforts [made] to enable the use of assets belonging to Afghanistan’s Central Bank for the benefit of the Afghan people.” It was thus signposting a possible move that some analysts have said could “be hinting that Afghan central bank assets will be released in some way” (see this tweet by the senior consultant on Afghanistan at the International Crisis Group’s Asia Programme, Graeme Smith).

Underpinning the problems for donors is that the Taleban seem to show little concern for their demands or any desire to make concessions in order to secure development financing. Yet, they continue to push for international recognition. Their various spokesmen and officials assert in media interviews that these aspirations are on track (see for example this 15 March ToloNews debate programme Mehwar and this ToloNews report). They say the road to recognition is a long one, that it will take time for their efforts to bear fruit and, anyway, they already have “silent recognition.” They point to their participation in international forums such as the Oslo talks or a 31 March meeting of the regional foreign ministers in China as evidence of their progress on this front.

However, what might at face value appear to be mixed messages actually reveal the quandaries and the complexities of the donors’ current approach to Afghanistan and its de facto rulers. The dilemmas are so difficult because there are many conflicting needs and political red lines. Donors feel the need to respond to Afghanistan’s humanitarian and economic crises, but also demand respect for human rights and security guarantees. The Taleban are ambitious for international legitimacy on their own terms, but have shown no inclination to concede anything to donors or countries in the region, or, indeed, their own people’s demands on education, representation or civil liberties, which might make recognition easier. Against this precarious backdrop, Western donors and diplomats are left trying to answer tough policy questions and take difficult funding decisions. What is perceived as sending mixed messages could just indicate that they are struggling to strike the right balance and find the acuity and dexterity needed to navigate what are perilous waters, with no ‘safe harbour’ in sight.

The Taleban might conclude from the mixed messages from the West that they should play for time as they further their own agenda on the ground; the tactic keeps donors optimistic that their policy of ‘constructive engagement’ will eventually bear fruit, despite the Emirate continuing to ignore the donors’ repeated demands. The Taleban may believe patience will win out, but that might be a misreading of the room. World events are fast redefining global relationships and funding agendas. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the disturbing ferocity of the assault has overtaken Afghanistan as a global concern and created a pressing demand for funds and diplomacy closer to home.

International aid flows to Afghanistan were already in decline, even before the fall of the Republic, but the global economic crisis looks set to curb donors’ largess further as they respond to the need to support their own people grappling with the cost of living crisis at home. There are increasing demands worldwide on the availability of funds for international aid, given that global humanitarian needs have reached an unprecedented USD 41 billion (see Global Humanitarian Overview 2022). While Afghanistan is currently one of the UN’s three system-wide responses (the others being northern Ethiopia and Ukraine), this is by no means a guarantee of continued large-scale humanitarian or future development assistance. With the state of the world as it is today, donors could still decide that they will provide the minimum required humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan and leave all other issues on the shelf.

Edited by Martine van Bijlert and Kate Clark

References

References
↑1 AAN has addressed these fundamental problems with the economy in several of its reports, including a special AAN report, ‘The Cost of Support to Afghanistan: Considering inequality, poverty and lack of democracy through the ‘rentier state’ lens; our initial reporting on the economic collapse, Afghanistan’s looming economic catastrophe: What next for the Taleban and the donors?, from November 2021, Killing the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg: Afghanistan’s economic distress post-15 August. We have also published a series of reports on people’s experiences of the economic collapse: Living in a Collapsed Economy (1): A cook, a labourer, a migrant worker, a small trader and a factory owner tell us what their lives look like now; Living in a Collapsed Economy (2): Even the people who still have money are struggling;  Living in a Collapsed Economy (3): Surviving poverty, food insecurity and the harsh winter; Food Aid in a Collapsed Economy: Relief, tensions and allegations; and Living With Radical Uncertainty in Rural Afghanistan: The work of survival.
↑2 See, for example, European Union conditions for resuming development aid here from 15 September 2021, as well as the same concerns raised by countries in the region detailed in this AAN report.
↑3 This is in line with the Taleban’s commitment under the so-called Doha agreement: to cut ties with groups such as al-Qaeda and not allow them to use Afghan soil to “threaten the security of the United States and its allies” (see AAN report here).
↑4 The United Nations Security Council imposed an international travel ban on 41 members of the Taleban in 1999 as part of the sanctions regime (see UN Resolution 1267), but that ban was partially waived in 2019 to allow 14 Taleban leaders to participate in the so-called peace talks in Doha.
↑5 Based on the exchange rate on 30 March 2022, 1 GBP = USD 1.31.
↑6 IPC defines famine/catastrophe (IPC phase 5) as a population where at least two per 10,000 people are dying every day (the crude death rate), more than 20 per cent are facing an extreme lack of food (near complete Food Consumption gap) and more than 30 per cent of children are suffering from acute malnutrition (Global Acute Malnutrition). IPC phase 4 (Emergency) is defined as large food consumption gaps which are reflected in very high acute malnutrition and excess mortality or households that can only meet these gaps by using emergency coping mechanisms such as selling assets. In IPC Phase 3 (Crisis) households either: have food consumption gaps that are reflected by high or above-usual acute malnutrition; or are marginally able to meet minimum food needs but only by depleting essential livelihood assets or through crisis-coping strategies (see Understanding the IPC Scales).
↑7 Reuters first reported plans to launch the Humanitarian Exchange Facility (HEF) in February 2022 based on an internal UN memo, which the news agency had seen. While the World Bank referred to the HEF in its April 2022 Afghanistan Development Update, the facility’s launch, at least in the immediate future, seems doubtful. The delay could be in part due to an ongoing investigation into irregularities in an estimated USD 61 million in loans given by the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS) – the agency tapped by the United Nations to manage the HEF – to a Singapore-based housing construction company owned by a British family (see here and here). The scandal, which was first reported by the development news website Devex, has led to the resignation of the agency’s Executive Director, Grete Faremo. In a tweet on 12 May, US ambassador to the UN, Chris Lu, said that the US was “deeply concerned about allegations of financial mismanagement and wrongdoing at UNOPS,” adding that her office was recommending that all new US funding to the agency be paused until the outcome of the investigation by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services.
↑8 Community Development Councils (CDCs) were established by the National Solidarity Programme (NSP) to empower rural communities to make decisions and manage and monitor their own development projects. By the time the Republic fell on 15 August 2022, more than 13,000 CDCs were active across Afghanistan. The community-led councils had an inclusive membership, including women, young people, and community elders.
↑9 In January, the ADB approved USD 405 million in direct grants to four UN agencies for food security, essential health services and education under its Sustaining Essential Services Delivery Project (Support for Afghan People). As part of this allocation, WFP will receive USD 135 million and FAO USD 65 million for emergency food assistance and support to smallholder farmers, including food-for-work and cash-for-work programmes. Another USD 200 million will go to UNICEF to maintain basic healthcare, essential hospital services and community-based classes, using the same curriculum as public schools. UNDP will receive USD 5 million to monitor the implementation of ADB-funded projects and conduct macroeconomic and social assessments.
↑10 The World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) responded to the issues raised by SIGAR. They concurred or partially concurred with recommendations 1 to 4 but did not concur with recommendation 5, arguing that it was “inconsistent with the structure of the trust fund mechanism.” See their responses on pages 24-26 of SIGAR’s 18-42 Audit Report.

 

Donors’ dilemma: How to provide aid to a country whose government you do not recognise
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The Climate Change Crisis in Afghanistan: The catastrophe worsens – what hope for action?

June 23, 2022

Mhd Assem Mayar

Afghanistan Analysts Network

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The earth has only one atmosphere, and the effects of climate change transcend political boundaries. Afghanistan is one of the lowest emitters of greenhouse gases, but among the top ten countries most vulnerable to climate change. The harm is already evident in the increased frequency of droughts, which are causing hunger and distress, and unfortunately, it is now clear that 2022 will be yet another year of drought in most parts of the country. AAN guest author Mohammad Assem Mayar*, a water resource management expert, looks at how the climate crisis is already affecting Afghanistan and at the likely projections for the future. He considers what the Republic did – or did not do – to reduce the harmful effects of global warming and finally discusses how climate change could be tackled under Taleban rule, now that Afghanistan is poorer, more isolated and subject to sanctions.
Looking to the skies for rain and snow

Every year, in winter and spring, Afghans look to the sky to see if snow and rain will fall that year. This last winter began well with higher than average snowfall in the end of December and early January.[1] After that, February and March were drier than average; only in the second week of March was there rainfall.

Winter snow is crucial for agriculture in Afghanistan: in the highlands, the snow acts as a reservoir, melting into the summer season and providing water for irrigation – although if the summer or spring is too hot, fast melting can cause disaster downstream, a lack of irrigation water into the summer or even worse, flooding. In the lowlands, snow moistens the soil, but not enough for rainfed crops to flourish. There, it is spring rain which is needed for rainfed agriculture to yield.

The good snowfall in the end of December 2021 and early January 2022 created hope in the hearts of farmers, and in provinces such as Baghlan, Kunduz, Takhar and Balkh, they sowed their rain-fed lands, even the steep, high slopes of hills inaccessible to tractors. Since then, hopes have faded; the growth of wheat cultivated in rainfed areas has been weak and may not yield a harvest this year. Those with livestock are also concerned. At the beginning of April, herders in Dasht-e Gabar in the west of Baghlan-e Jadid district of Baghlan province told a colleague:

The grass is stressed because of the sun and the weather being hotter than in the past. Grass, which previously had grown to above a half-metre at this time of the year is now only about 10 cm high and turning black in the sunshine. Herders are very worried about the situation – if it doesn’t rain in the coming days, we’ll have to sell our cattle.[2]

Those with access to water from snowmelt are faring better in the north of Afghanistan. However, in the south, the situation is already dire: irrigation water is looking scarce. According to discussions with local people in Jaghatu district of Wardak province and Kandahar city, multiple wells have dried up and people are now lacking drinking water. On 5 April 2022, the Taleban announced they would release Dahla reservoir’s water for twenty-two days to enable farmers irrigate pomegranate orchards, but then stopped the water early. The Dahla reservoir in Kandahar, like the Kajaki in Helmand, did not fill fully. In a normal year, at this time, these dams would be overflowing. Recently, Azadi Radio reported that a person was killed in a water dispute between two villages in the Chak district of Wardak province. Such cases are expected across the country in the future if climate change-induced droughts are not handled.

The Taleban government has not yet declared a drought, and may yet do so this month, as the Republic did. However, it is now evident that in most of Afghanistan, 1401/2022 is another drought year. Moreover, Afghans are learning that what is ‘normal’ in their climate and weather patterns has changed, and changed for the worst.

The upward trend in temperatures is not easily discernible to the general public, unlike the changes in rain and snow fall, but they are evident in the long-term data records. The consequences of higher temperatures are serious, as global warming affects the water cycle, intensifies extreme events such as floods, droughts, glacier melt and storms, and is leading to a rise in sea levels.[3] The earth only has one atmosphere and global warming harm transcends political boundaries.

The release of large amounts of greenhouse gases[4] into the earth’s atmosphere that began with the industrial revolution is the primary cause of the ongoing climate crisis. Developed countries still play the major role in the production of these gases, while poorer countries, smaller emitters of greenhouse gases per head of population, are among the most vulnerable to climate change owing to their dependency on natural resources and their limited capacity to cope with climate variability and extremes. Afghanistan is in the latter category. It is one of the lowest contributors of greenhouse gases (179th out of 209 countries), but is in the top ten countries most vulnerable to climate change (see the graphic illustrating this here).

The very specific driver of the recent droughts is the varying temperature of water in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, the so-called El Nino (warmer than usual) and La Nina (cooler than usual) effects, which plays a significant role in the world’s weather conditions. Variation from year to year is natural, but global warming is making these variations more frequent and more intense, with consequences for many countries, including Afghanistan.

2018 was a severe drought year in Afghanistan because there was a La Nina in the Pacific. The following year was extremely wet and good for farmers in Afghanistan, although with flooding, owing to El Nino in the Pacific. Subsequently, 2020 was a normal year for precipitation in Afghanistan, while 2021 again saw an extreme drought due to the reoccurrence of the La Nina. La Nina is still affecting the Pacific Ocean, and together with the fact that cumulative precipitation over the past six months of the current ‘water year’, which runs from October to September (map is available here), is up to 45 per cent less than average, meaning that Afghanistan’s drought is continuing. Drought and flood extremes in four out of five years show the change in the water cycle in Afghanistan. The increased frequency of these extreme conditions in the last five years are a result of climate change.

The effect of climate change on Afghanistan up to now: from temperature to river flow 

Comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of climate change and its projections for the future for Afghanistan was carried out by NEPA with the technical support of UNEP and WFP in 2016, and are available here and here. These analyses highlighted that:

  • Temperatures have been increasing across the country over the past thirty years. According to this UNEP report from 2016, Afghanistan’s mean annual temperature, which had risen by 0.6°C from 1960 to 2008, had since increased significantly and dramatically, by a further 1.2°C. This shift has intensified glacier and snow melt and led to an increase in the number of flash floods, glacial lake outburst floods and river flooding.
  • Climate change has doubled the number of droughts compared to the previous decades. Statistically, this affects the long-term average of precipitation and indeed, analyses by WFP, UNEP and NEPA showed a decline in annual precipitation in most of the country’s north and centre.
  • Afghanistan’s glaciers are melting. Over 14 per cent of the total area of glaciers in Afghanistan’s highlands was lost between 1990 and 2015, researchers found. This pace of decline is expected to continue. (For more details about Afghanistan’s melting glaciers, please read AAN’s report here). Glaciers and snow melt provide base flow to the rivers in the summer and their early melting or decline affect river flow in the summer.
  • The shifts in precipitation pattern and temperature have also affected patterns of river flow. For example, the author’s research findings reported that river flow in the Kabul River basin has changed slightly with an increase in the number of high and low flow days. This means that flood days, as well as low flow or dry days during the summer season have both increased, with obvious repercussions for water management and the utilisation of water in agriculture and other sectors along the year. It is assumed there have been similar changes in Afghanistan’s other river basins.

Projections for future climate change in Afghanistan

Projections for the climate are made using Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios, which vary as to the level of greenhouse gases emitted globally up to the end of the 21st century.[5] Four RCP scenarios were used for climate modelling in the period up to the fifth global assessment report in 2014.[6] Since then, new RCPs have been adopted, but as analysis for Afghanistan using the new climate scenarios has yet to be carried out, the older scenarios are cited in this report. All of the scenarios foresee Afghanistan getting hotter and receiving less precipitation, but to a greater or lesser extent. It is worth stressing that the failure of the world to start seriously to tackle greenhouse gas emissions means that models based on the newer RCP scenarios show even more severe harm to the climate, globally.

Projection of mean annual temperature for Afghanistan for a base period (grey: 1975-2005) and a scenario period (2006-2100) showing the effect on temperature of relatively limited greenhouse gas emissions (green, RCP 4.5, emissions peaking in 2040 and then declining) and uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions (red, RCP 8.5). The spread of the models are depicted as transparent areas and the means as lines. Both trends are statistically significant and depicted as a dashed line. The magnitudes of the trends are plotted in their relative colours. Source: UNEP and NEPA

Modelling of what would happen to Afghanistan’s climate was carried out by WFP, UNEP and NEPA in 2015. The projections using what they called a “moderate” scenario, (RCP 4.5) would see greenhouse gas emission peaking in 2040 (see their report here) included:

  • Temperatures in Afghanistan would increase by more than the global average and there would be further melting of glaciers and snow cover, a shift in precipitation from snow to rainfall and a rise in demand for water for crops, with plants possibly requiring extra irrigation.
  • There would be an increase in drought and flood risks. Local droughts would become the norm by 2030, while floods would be a secondary risk.
  • Snowfall would diminish in the central highlands, potentially leading to reduced spring and summer flows in the Helmand, Harirud-Murghab and Northern River basins, while spring rainfall would decrease across most of the country.
  • In the northeast and small pockets of the south and east, along the border with Iran, there might be a five per cent or more increase in ‘heavy precipitation events’ that can lead to flash floods. However, these potentially devastating events might actually decrease across most of the south and other parts of the north.
  • In the medium-term, the frequency of snowmelt-related floods in spring might increase simply due to accelerated melting associated with higher spring temperatures.

Assessing how the effects of climate change would translate into economic impacts is complicated, although some attempts have been made, for example by the World Economic Forum estimated that climate change could wipe off up to 18 per cent of GDP from the world-wide economy by 2050. However, in developing countries, such as Afghanistan, which are more dependent on agriculture and water resources, the losses from climate change will be more severe than the worldwide average and will directly threaten their food security as well as resilience to natural disasters.

What could be done to help Afghans cope with the looming climate crisis

Attempts to limit the impact of climate change can generally be divided into two categories: climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation. Mitigation is adapting the economy to reduce greenhouse emissions and is less of a priority for Afghanistan, given it is such a low emitter of greenhouse gases, just 0.19 per cent of the global total. However, adaptation is crucial and urgent. Afghanistan is in the top ten of countries which will be harmed by climate change, which means it is imperative to adapt the economy, agriculture, water management, energy and environment to reduce the harm, and strengthen communities’ resilience as quickly as possible.

Tackling climate change requires multi-dimensional actions, including: institutional development (administrative frameworks, strategy, policy, planning, and procedures), legalisation, capacity development and investment on physical infrastructures. Therefore, best practice is to design and implement a comprehensive programme which includes all the affected sectors.

However, in the meantime, implementing local and small-scale adaptation measures can also help to reduce the effects of climate change. For example, rainwater could be harvested by constructing small ponds and dams, storing the water for later use, and playing a vital role in reducing flood risk. Constructing such harvesting structures would be useful nationwide, but especially so in the catchment of karezs. A karez, also known as a qanat, is an ancient irrigation system, with long horizontal tunnels and vertical wells, that taps into the groundwater table in the hillsides, using gravity, rather than any external power. It is the only water resource in many remote areas in the south of Afghanistan.  Many karezs are reported to be dry, but small investments could replenish this ancient sustainable water resource. In the winter, when there is less work, people could build small ponds and water barriers in the valleys of their villages using stones and local materials, enabling karezs to operate longer and avoiding them from drying up. Such voluntary, communal work, known as hashar, is familiar to most Afghans.

On a bigger scale, the glaciers in the highlands, which are so crucial for providing meltwater for agriculture, but which are thinning and shrinking, could be compensated for by creating new artificial glaciers. These are developed by slowing down the flow of water during the cold season so that it freezes, enabling additional water to be stored and released more gradually. A detailed article by the author about the feasibility of artificial glaciers in Afghanistan is available here in Pashto and a more explanation in English can be read here.

Furthermore, as climate change affects snow accumulation and melting process, mountain snow now plays less role as a natural reservoir of water for the summer season. Thus, the assessment of what and where reservoirs are needed, conducted during Daud Khan’s regime in the 1970s to determine the country’s hydropower and irrigation potential, is out of date. It did not recommend dams in the highlands; a new assessment is required, which would recommend additional reservoir sites for regulating water to meet the new demand. This would help to better implement any drought risk management strategy and would play a considerable role in mitigating the risk of floods.

Avoiding water losses in any irrigation system helps to ensure a greater area can be irrigated. Investment in the rehabilitation of intakes, canals and water conveyance structures is required. New irrigation technology, such as drip or sprinkler irrigation, although expensive to implement, enables farmers to use water effectively and expand their area of cultivation. A policy of subsidisation could help farmers switch from the less effective furrow irrigation method, where small channels are dug to carry water to crops, to the much more effective drip irrigation method. Afghanistan’s neighbours, Iran and Uzbekistan, have already implemented such policies, waiving farmers adopting such new technology, from taxation for several years.

Reforestation is another adaptation measure that reduces the harm of climate change. Local people can avoid deforestation and work toward expanding the forest cover. Applying drip irrigation technology could easily help expand forests on the hillsides, particularly in the major cities, and would also improve air quality and help to reduce ‘heat islands’ which boost temperatures in the summer months. Forestation also improves the stability of the hillsides, helping prevent landslides and also reduces the risk of flooding by slowing water flow.

As to reducing Afghanistan’s own greenhouse gas emissions, there could be a wider adoption of solar, wind and other renewable energies. Afghanistan has a high potential for solar energy across the country and for wind energy in its western provinces. A policy for prioritising and utilising solar energy by government, in the private sector, by international organisations and wealthier Afghans who use generators when mains electricity fails, could considerably reduce carbon emissions. In rural areas, small ‘discretised’ grids could be established using renewables to provide electricity for homes. This technology has been used, but for extracting groundwater, which is unsustainable and should be avoided. To make groundwater extraction using solar energy sustainable, farmers would have to make sure the aquifers were recharged with an equivalent amount of rainwater.

Tackling climate change in Afghanistan during the Republic

Under the Republic, combatting climate change focused on two types of activities: (1) developing institutions, passing legalisation and formulating policies and strategies; and (2) efforts to secure finance to pay for tackling climate change. Each of these activities is discussed separately below.

What will become clear is how, despite 15 years of efforts, the Republic carried out very little climate change adaptation despite resources, including technical support, being relatively plentiful. The opportunity for adaptation, which Afghans need so urgently, may already have been lost, or at the very least delayed. Since August 2021 and the capture of Afghanistan by the Taleban, the country has again become isolated, far poorer, with deep cuts to development aid, and UN and US sanctions applied suddenly not to an armed opposition group, but to the government and therefore the whole country. Finding ways to help Afghanistan cope with the already devastating effects of climate change has become far, far more difficult.

Institutional development and legislation

Afghanistan had to establish various standard mechanisms and laws as a precondition for getting the help it needed – both technical expertise and funding – to first analyse the likely effects of climate change and then try to mitigate the harm. Such a pathway was deemed necessary in the early 2000s after the Republic was established. However, it should be stressed that it was taken with little urgency by the politicians of the Republic, who seemed to view global warming primarily as yet another demand of the donors that needed paying lip service to, or a new opportunity to gain funds.

Although the global warming trend has been identified since the 1930s, it was not until the 1980s that thoughts about combatting it began and, globally, institutions and platforms to address climate change began to be established. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was signed by 154 states at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro from 3 to 14 June 1992. The convention entered into force with a secretariat headquartered in Bonn on 21 March 1994. The first annual United Nations climate change conference (COP1) was held in Berlin in 1995.

Afghanistan signed this framework convention in 1992, but ratified it only in 2002. That decade was one in which war and isolation meant climate change and its harmful consequences were rarely spoken about in Afghanistan. With the establishment of the internationally-backed Republic at the end of 2001, environmental institutions and laws were gradually established. NEPA was established in April 2005. Afghanistan’s first environmental law was promulgated in early 2007. That law defined NEPA’s function, power and position as Afghanistan’s environmental policy-making and regulatory institution. NEPA’s mandate and institutional structure gradually evolved and in 2010 a division devoted to climate change was established, as one of the six key divisions.

To obtain funds for climate change mitigation and adaptation projects, NEPA prepared a nationwide assessment and other documentation for tackling climate change. It developed a National Adaptation Programme of Action in 2009, following consideration of a wide variety of potential adaptation measures across all sectors. Afghanistan submitted its first national report to the UN framework convention on climate change in 2013 with help from the Green Environment Facility (GEF) and the United Nation’s Environment Programme.[7] (By comparison, Afghanistan’s northern neighbour, Tajikistan, submitted its initial communication in 2002). The first report said that “Afghanistan does not have the institutional arrangement to provide information and know-how on the environmental sound technologies to get easy access by private companies and individuals.”

In 2013, Afghanistan ratified the Kyoto Protocol, which serves to implement the UN framework convention on climate change UN framework convention on climate change objective of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere in order to stop dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate.

In 2016, NEPA with the technical support of UNEP and WFP and the financial support of GEF completed a comprehensive analysis of already observed climate change in Afghanistan and projections for the future. In the same year, with the technical support of the United Nation’s Development Programme (UNDP), NEPA developed a Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan for Afghanistan (ACCSAP). Following this research and analysis, in 2017, Afghanistan was able to submit its second national communication; it aimed at providing updated information on the country’s steps towards the implementation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It included a greenhouse gas inventory, a list of sources of emissions, quantified using standardised methods, and the systematic collection and analysis of national climate data. There was also information on how national strategies for climate change adaptation and mitigation were being developed and the strengthening of the National Climate Change Committee as the lead inter-ministerial coordination mechanism on climate change. (For more information about the climate change and governance in Afghanistan please read here).

Climate change affects a wide range of sectors and this was reflected in the National Adaptation Programme of Action and Initial National Communication as: i) agriculture; ii) biodiversity and ecosystems; iii) infrastructure and energy; iv) forestry and rangelands; v) natural disasters; and vi) water. It was recognised that climate change would need to be incorporated into the legislative frameworks, sectoral policies and strategies of the ministries of agriculture, energy and water, rural development, public health, urban development and mining, as well as NEPA and the Afghanistan National Disaster Management Authority. The Ministry of Agriculture, with the support of FAO developed a drought risk management strategy that took climate change into account. Other ministries, including energy and water, had yet to finalise their policies and strategies when the Republic fell and have not done so since.

After fifteen years of institution-building, law-making and fact-finding, a generous conclusion would be that the former Afghan republic had been on the path to incorporating efforts to mitigate the harm of climate change into its policies and strategies. A less generous assessment would be to point to how little it actually achieved. As to the Taleban, on the first day of the COP26 international conference in Glasgow in November 2021, senior Taleban official in Doha, Suhail Shahin, called for the resumption of climate change-related projects which had “already been approved and were funded by Green Climate Fund, UNDP, Afghan Aid” (see his tweets here). Since then, to the best knowledge of this author, climate change risks have not been discussed in any of numerous discussions conducted between the Taleban and representatives of the donor countries in Doha. However, the Taleban have spoken about the need for better water management, which is one of the key components of climate change adaptation.

Efforts to secure financing to tackle the climate crisis

Despite all the documentation and information on funding needs, which are detailed below, the Republic itself did not allocate any specific budget for responding to climate change. The Ministry of Finance in its national budget narrative for the year 2021/1400 claimed that risks due to climate change were not measurable. Thus, it recommended all sectors to finance the consequences of climate change from their available financial resources. The same text was copy-pasted in multiple years’ budgets with no addition or further details, suggesting how little importance was attached to climate change. The one partial exception was the Ministry of Energy and Water which constructed some check dams, small structures built across waterways to store water and reduce erosion, prior to the collapse of the Republic, which could be seen as an action to mitigate the harm of climate change.

Instead, with regard to climate change caused largely by developed-country gas emissions, major efforts focused on securing international financing for addressing the effects of the climate crisis. According to Afghanistan’s Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC)[8] submitted to the UN framework convention on climate change in 2015, the Republic estimated that it would need more than one billion USD per year from donors during the following decade to “overcome the existing gaps and barriers toward sufficiently addressing its climate change adaptation needs.” The government planned to allocate 70 per cent of the 10.7 billion USD expected as financial support for climate change adaptation (until 2030) to watershed management and the expansion of irrigated agriculture. Furthermore, it said that 6.6 billion USD would be needed to reduce greenhouse gases emission in order to meet 2030 goals.[9]

The Global Environment Facility (GEF) has funded most of the climate change-related projects in Afghanistan after 2002. Since the establishment of NEPA, GEF funded various projects through third-party implementers, such as UNDP and UNEP. GEF also funded several projects regarding climate adaptation under the framework of the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock and other ministries. Third-party implementers (UNEP, UNDP) also secured funds from GEF’s Least Developed Countries Fund programme, established in 2001 in recognition that delays in addressing adaptation needs could increase vulnerability or costs in the future. Those funds supported the preparation of Afghanistan’s National Communications to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the National Adaptation Programme of Action and the execution of three full-size climate change adaptation projects (LDCF-1 from 2013-2016 , LDCF-2 from 2014-2019, and LDCF-3, undated in literature).

More funds became available to developing countries to promote low-emission and climate-resilient development pathways after the Green Climate Fund (GCF) was set up in 2011 under the UN framework convention on climate change. Afghanistan, however, has not yet received funds from the GCF directly as the government administrations tackling climate change (ministries of energy and water, agriculture, irrigation and livestock, rural rehabilitation and development, and NEPA) still lack the capacity (this was even before the Taleban takeover). NEPA established an inter-ministerial board to facilitate development of proposals to the GCF in 2016, but has yet to be accredited for applying for funds.

During COP21 in 2015, a new international climate agreement (the Paris Agreement), applicable to all countries, was signed, aiming to keep global warming at between 1.5°C and 2°C, in accordance with the recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The agreement said that 100 billion US Dollars in public and private resources will need to be raised each year from 2020 onwards to finance projects that enable countries to adapt to the impacts of climate change (rise in sea level, droughts, etc) or reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This funding will gradually increase and some developing countries will also be able to become donors, on a voluntary basis, to help the poorest countries.

Afghanistan does not have an accredited national implementing entity for applying directly to the GEF or GCF for funds. Besides, owing to the low-institutional capacity, even under the Republic, the government could not directly secure the required funds. Therefore agencies like the Asian Development Bank, UNDP, UNEP, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the WFP, and the World Bank, which are all accredited for securing this funding, are brokering the process.[10]

The Adaptation Fund is another funding agency that finances adaptation projects and programmes aimed at reducing the adverse effects of climate change on communities, countries, and sectors. The UNDP, on behalf of Afghanistan, submitted a proposal in 2019 to the Adaptation Fund for 9.4 million USD grant in order to rehabilitate karezs. This project was planned to be jointly implemented by UNDP and Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development before the Taleban takeover. Furthermore, the International Fund for Agriculture Development also supported projects under the ministry of agriculture, and of rural development in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan gained the approval for a 17.2 million USD grant of GCF and 4.2 million co-financing of other organizations through UNDP in August 2020 to initiate renewable energy in rural areas of Afghanistan. As of January 2021, 4 million USD of the total 21.4 million USD earmarked for the project had been disbursed, but, since the Taleban takeover, the programme has been suspended.

Under the Republic, considerable technical support and resources were also available to Afghanistan, including the Climate Technology Centre and Network hosted by UNEP which aims to enhance the transfer of climate smart technologies in order to promote adaptive capacity and climate change mitigation efforts in developing countries.[11]

Recent research found that only six per cent of nations had managed to obtain climate change-related funds through their national institutions. Others relied on international bodies to broker the process. According to Carbon Brief, Afghanistan has been among the countries which did not receive funding directly from the UN’s Green Climate Fund. This was the case before and after the fall of the Republic. “Unfortunately, most climate vulnerable, least-developed and developing countries have found it a bit difficult to access,” Dr Emmanuel Tachie-Obeng of the Ghana Environmental Protection Agency and the Climate Vulnerable Forum, told Carbon Brief in January 2022.

After the Taleban takeover

The rupture between Afghanistan and its erstwhile donors and the international system in general, that followed the Taleban’s takeover on 15 August 2021 has hit many activities aimed at mitigating the harm of climate change. The Taleban government has not been recognised by any state, meaning Afghanistan had no delegates at COP26 in Glasgow – although some climate activists tried to independently represent Afghanistan in COP26, they were unable to secure visas. However, the repercussions go much further than this.

The significance of UN sanctions, which targeted named individuals in the Taleban and the Haqqani network, and US sanctions, which targeted the group as a whole expanded suddenly when the Taleban were no longer an armed opposition group but the government of Afghanistan. Programmes which built up government agencies or worked through them were suspended, as was development aid. UN Security Council Resolution 2615 issued in December 2021, provided a more permissive environment, making humanitarian and basic human needs aid much easier to implement, while the US Treasury’s General license 20 (GL-20), issued in late February 2022, loosened up that country’s sanctions “for commercial and financial transactions in Afghanistan, including with its governing institutions” said the press release. The aim, it said, was to ensure US sanctions “do not prevent or inhibit transactions and activities needed to provide aid to and support the basic human needs of the people of Afghanistan and underscores the United States’ commitment to working with the private sector, international partners and allies, and international organizations to support the people of Afghanistan.”

However, the August 2021 rupture also meant that donors have been more careful about funding anything that involves the Taleban administration. Some climate change mitigation measures such as flood protection or drought resilience are classed as humanitarian. However, the major climate crisis programmes that had already been agreed or that were in the pipeline have been suspended. They include:

  • Funding for significant drought prevention and water management projects such as the 222.50 million USD World Bank project to develop early warning and response systems, the Asian Development Bank’s Arghandab Integrated Water Resources Development project and the Afghanistan Drought Early Warning Decision Support Tool, which was in a test phase.
  • The 21.4 million USD project for initiating renewable energy in rural areas of Afghanistan implemented by UNDP and the Ministry of rural development has also been halted and faces an uncertain future.
  • The karez rehabilitation project funded by the International Fund for Agriculture Development and implemented by UNDP and MRRD has been suspended.
  • A 9.9 million USD-funded irrigation project implemented by FAO and the Ministry of Energy and Water and funded by the Japan International Cooperation Agency was suspended.
  • Without the now-suspended technical assistance of UNEP and other supporting agencies, NEPA on behalf of Afghanistan will not be able to submit the next national communication reports to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. This will also suspend understanding of the climate change effect and monitoring of any progress achieved.[12]

It should be noted that most funding sources would anyway have demanded a full re-appraisal of a programme if the main executing agency had changed as it is the case after the Taleban takeover, ie even in the absence of sanctions.

What can be done to tackle the climate crisis in Afghanistan now?

The potential actions to help Afghans adapt to the looming ravages of climate change are already known. They include: schemes to harvest rainwater, including from small check dams to much larger reservoirs; rehabilitating karezes; changing from furrow to drip irrigation and tillage adaptation; projects that replenish groundwater to support water extraction during drought; introducing crops and trees that require less water; seeding and improving rangeland; constructing artificial glaciers to reduce the variability of meltwater flow and improve water storage; stopping deforestation and; supporting Afghan technical and scientific capacity. They range from community-level projects to major engineering works to social and educational action.

Many questions could be asked about why more was not done during the Republic when funds and technical expert help was plentiful. Now, following the Taleban takeover, far less support is on offer. Some small-scale, community-level improvements are being carried out via UN agencies and NGOs, including aspects even of some of the GEF-funded programmes, especially following the UN resolution of December 2021 and US Treasury waiver of February 2022 eased restrictions. Finding even small ways through the political impasse is still tricky. Generally, work that does not involve the Taleban government and is not aimed at building up government capabilities is the simplest to continue, or to begin. Nationwide, the work going ahead on climate change adaptation is patchy and absolutely inadequate to the scale or urgency of the crisis. Whatever activities are going on could be described, at best, as pathways to be expanded when and if the political situation improves. Adaptation at scale, though, needs government.

It should be significant that adaptation to climate change is not controversial for the Taleban, nor for donors, nor the wider population. Unlike, for example, education, there is the potential for a broad consensus that action is necessary and urgent. Afghanistan also has a strong tradition of communal work so there are grassroots structures and traditions to draw on. Given the political impasse, however, for more donor-funded programmes to get approval, the Taleban would need to accept that state involvement is currently anathema to donors, so if they want climate change adaptations to go ahead, even thought they are the ‘de facto authorities’, they could not expect too much involvement in programmes. For a group determined to emphasise its sovereignty in the land, this is difficult.

And/or, donors would need to reconsider their absolute ban on working with the Taleban government. For example, there could be some re-engagement with those parts of the administration where there are still competent and experienced, politically neutral, technical staff, such as in the Ministry of Rural Development, with possibly a step-by-step engagement that involved monitoring while those ministries proved their bona fides and capability. The donor decision to implement aid programmes via UN agencies without recourse to the Afghan state necessarily diminishes the slowly built-up capacity of Afghan state agencies such as NEPA and ministries such as agriculture, energy and water and rural development. Also, while UN agencies might be the safe choice of donors, reluctant to sustain the Taleban in power, they are exorbitantly expensive, less efficient and tend to know the country less well than Afghanistan’s own civil society. However, working at anything scaled-up needs some state involvement.

The Earth’s climate crisis has been caused by developed countries. The Paris Climate Agreement recognises this and requires them to compensate poor countries for the effects of climate change through sponsoring adaptation initiatives. That agreement recognises that countries like Afghanistan are suffering out of all proportion to the contribution they have made to damaging the planet’s atmosphere and climate. For Afghans, it is additionally unfair that the change of government means programmes backed by global funds are largely blocked when the climate emergency is already hitting the country hard, causing hunger and distress. The need for adaptation is urgent, yet the political impasse over aid and recognition looks to be enduring, and consequently also, the block on most aspects of the major, globally-funded, already-agreed programmes. However, unlike all the other causes of crises facing Afghanistan, the climate change emergency will continue to worsen, regardless of whatever and whenever a political settlement eventually materialises.

Edited by Kate Clark

* Dr Mohammad Assem Mayar is a water resource management expert and former lecturer at Kabul Polytechnic University in Kabul, Afghanistan. This year, he completed his doctorate at the Institute for Modelling Hydraulics and Environmental Systems at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He tweets via @assemmayar1.

References

References
↑1 The cause was what is called a Madden–Julian Oscillation event in December 2021.  This is an eastward moving disturbance of clouds, rainfall, winds and pressure that traverses the planet in the tropics and returns to its initial starting point after an average of 30 to 60 days. According to one study, it can result in a 23% increase in daily precipitation relative to the mean in Afghanistan.
↑2 A recent follow-up call to Baghlan indicates that rainfed agriculture failed. A Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) map backs this up and also shows the failure of rainfed crops in Kunduz. Crops in Badghis, Faryab and Jawzjan provinces are faring better than last year.
↑3 The continuous movement of water in atmosphere (from vapour to liquid and solid phases) is called the water cycle. Water exists in the atmosphere as cloud vapours, and precipitate as rain and snow. Consequently, water flows on the earth before evaporating back into the atmosphere.
↑4 Gases that are emitted from the earth into the atmosphere and trap heat resulting in global temperature rises. Carbon dioxide and chlorofluorocarbons are examples of greenhouse gases.
↑5 RCP pathways are adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to help modellers work out different climate futures, all of which are considered possible, but vary according to the volume of greenhouse gases emitted in the years to come. RCPs are labelled after their ‘radiative forcing value’, ie the size of the energy imbalance in the atmosphere – more incoming energy from sunlight than the earth radiates to space – as measured in watts per square metre, so RCP2.6 is a scenario with an imbalance of 2.6 W/m2, RCP4.5 an imbalance of 4.5 W/m2, and so on.
↑6 The four scenarios assume that: greenhouse gas emissions peak between 2010-2020 and then decline (RCP2.6); greenhouse gas emissions peak around 2040 and then decline (RCP4.5); greenhouse gas emissions peak around 2080 and then decline (RCP6) and; greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise throughout the 21st century (RCP8.5).
↑7 The regular reports, called National Communication are a requirement made by the fund called Green Climate Facility from all parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
↑8 The INDC represents a country’s steps to decrease national emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change.
↑9 As one example of climate change mitigation during the years of the Republic, under the Montreal Protocol, which sets binding progressive phase-out obligations for developed and developing countries for all the major ozone-depleting substances, including chlorofluorocarbons, halons and less damaging transitional chemicals such as hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs). Afghanistan is committed to reducing its use of HCFCs, chemicals that are used in refrigeration and air conditions that destroy ozone layer and contribute to climate change, by 35 per cent of by 2020 and 67.5 per cent by 2025. To achieve this milestone, the Afghan republic’s cabinet in 2018 banned imports of HCFC-based equipment, which came into effect in November 2018. Following that, the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation was supporting the Afghan republic in training technicians for customs  to implement ban on HCFC equipment. In addition, Afghanistan once restricted importing vehicles more than a decade old , but then abandoned the rule because of the protests from traders, claiming they had placed orders for old cars and Afghans could not afford newer models.
↑10 For example, FAO and the Green Climate Fund joined forces in 2019 to implement the first-ever GCF-funded project in Afghanistan. It had focused on building the capacity of NEPA. Later, another proposal was submitted to extend this project for two more years. The implementation of these projects aimed at enabling NEPA to independently handle GCF-funding projects and lead government coordination on GCF projects. A list of the small projects implemented in Afghanistan and sponsored by various donors is available here.
↑11 In addition, the Asian Development Bank funded a joint master degree programme of integrated water management implemented by the Kabul Polytechnic University and Griffith University of Australia for the employees of the ministry of Energy and Water. Funds for this project were transferred to the Kabul Polytechnic University’s account from ADB at the start of the project, which meant that, after a three-month break following the takeover of the country by Taleban, the programme could resume as normal.
↑12 As UNEP was assisting NEPA in preparing the national communication report for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, it could continue this task without the Taleban government’s involvement in order to avoid a pause in climate change monitoring and fill the gap of submitting regular reports to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

REVISIONS:

This article was last updated on 14 Jun 2022

 

The Climate Change Crisis in Afghanistan: The catastrophe worsens – what hope for action?
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Why Have the Wars in Afghanistan and Ukraine Played Out So Differently?

June 23, 2022

BY: William Byrd, Ph.D.

United States Institute of Peace

June 23, 2022

The United States, NATO, national leaders and security forces failed in Afghanistan but not in Ukraine.

The Taliban insurgency and U.S. troop withdrawal, and Russian incursions culminating in the February 24 invasion, constituted existential “stress tests” for Afghanistan and Ukraine, respectively. Ukraine and its international supporters have succeeded in preventing an outright Russian victory, imposing severe and continuing costs on Russia — ranging from high casualties to financial sanctions. Whatever happens next, the invasion has solidified Ukraine’s national will, status and orientation as an independent, Western-oriented sovereign country. In sharp contrast, Afghanistan’s government and security forces collapsed within a month after U.S. troops left the country, its president and many others fled, and the Taliban rapidly took over.
Ukraine’s success and Afghanistan’s collapse came about despite both countries facing messy politics in recent decades (including disputed elections, irregular changes of government and political violence), neighboring countries’ interference, widespread corruption (both countries have been more corrupt than most of their neighbors, according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index) and security sector weaknesses. The many differences between the two countries include some that favor Ukraine: far higher level of development and average per capita income; proximity to Europe; 100 percent literacy versus 37 percent in Afghanistan; far better human and social indicators more generally; and much less ethnic fractionalization. Other differences, however, should have favored Afghanistan: its centuries-long history as an independent country and the Taliban’s weakness as compared to Russia. Strikingly, the same external actors — the United States, NATO and its member states — failed in Afghanistan but have more effectively supported Ukraine. What key factors explain success and failure?

Two Different Conflicts

The conflicts in Afghanistan and Ukraine have been fundamentally different. Ukraine is in a defensive conventional and hybrid war against Russia. Afghanistan was subjected to a counterterrorism (CT) intervention in 2001 that morphed into a massive counterinsurgency (CI) effort involving military action, security sector support, development programs and institution building. Moreover, Afghanistan was a focal point for the global war on terror going back to 9/11 and earlier, whereas Ukraine never was. Not being a nexus in that “war” arguably was a success factor in post-conflict transitions to stable peace.

The narrative of foreign invasion was a positive factor for Ukraine but not for Afghanistan. The absence of U.S. and NATO combat forces was conducive to a Ukrainian narrative of Russian aggression and building a unified and effective national response, but in Afghanistan this factor was unfavorable for the previous government. The massive and comprehensive U.S.-led international engagement meant the Afghan government could not credibly characterize the conflict as its own fight, let alone against foreign forces. The Taliban narrative of fighting a jihad against foreign invaders was more credible, even though the Taliban received essential support from Pakistan and elsewhere.

Counterinsurgency Challenges

The CI effort in Afghanistan depended on key success factors that were not in place. Although most insurgencies around the world fail, Afghanistan has been an exception, having seen two victorious insurgencies against great powers in the past 40 years. Government victory in CI requires a long time horizon and certain prerequisites. In particular, it has been virtually impossible to decisively defeat an insurgency if it has access to reliable and durable sanctuaries outside the country. Pakistan never wavered in providing sanctuary for the Taliban, and indeed their headquarters was in Quetta. Moreover, the international military intervention and security sector and stabilization initiatives as well as the Afghan government’s own efforts were plagued by short-termism, not looking out much into the future let alone planning five to 10 years ahead in line with the time required for sustainable success at CI.

NATO was not set up for CI, but the United States should have learned from its own CI experience. NATO, as a defensive alliance designed to deter and defend against a Soviet conventional or nuclear attack, was much better positioned to support Ukraine’s defensive war with Russia than to successfully pursue CI in Afghanistan. However, the United States had extensive experience from Vietnam as well as other, smaller CI efforts. Moreover, there was ample scope for learning from experience during the nearly two decades of the intervention in Afghanistan, as well as for cross-learning between Afghanistan and Iraq. Some lessons from past experience were laid out in the U.S. Army-Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual, but efforts to apply its doctrines did not lead to better outcomes.

Different Security Sector Reform Outcomes

Security sector reform in Ukraine worked, but Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) failed. There is no sugarcoating the collapse of the ANDSF versus Ukrainian security forces’ successful resistance against Russia. The latter gained valuable experience during the post-2014 conflict in the eastern Donbas region, whereas the ANDSF did not appear to learn that much from being trained and mentored by U.S. and other NATO forces as well as working alongside them against the Taliban over more than a decade, and never became able to operate fully independently.

The United States and NATO effectively supported Ukraine’s security sector reform but not the ANDSF. The same external actors (the United States, the NATO alliance and various NATO member countries) were engaged in supporting Ukraine and Afghanistan’s security sectors, with strikingly different results. A crucial difference was that the Afghan Army and police were built from scratchon a new foundation and model, whereas security sector reform in Ukraine was evolutionary, starting small when the country joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace in 1994 and accelerating from 2014 onward.

Unlike in Ukraine, there was enormous built-in ANDSF dependence on unending foreign support. The cost of the ANDSF — equivalent to more than a quarter of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product and funded almost entirely by foreign aid — exceeded that of any other country and could never be covered by domestic revenues. Dependency also encompassed logistics, maintenance (by foreign contractors) and key enablers such as airpower. Though Ukraine effectively absorbed increasing amounts of foreign military equipment in the run-up to the Russian invasion, the share of its security costs covered by aid was small before 2022.

The sheer size and dominance of U.S. and NATO support militated against the success of the ANDSF. Compared to targeted assistance and never more than a handful of foreign military advisors and trainers in Ukraine, international military forces in Afghanistan peaked at well over 100,000 during the 2009-11 “surge” period, and enormous aid resources went into the ANDSF over nearly two decades. International experience suggests that the success of security sector reform has been negatively correlated with the magnitude of foreign involvement and the degree of reliance on foreign models.

Complicated Politics

Both Ukraine and Afghanistan suffered from difficult politics, but this played out differently. Ukrainian political groupings and leaders coalesced against the Russian threat, despite differences among them including in views toward Russia. In two successive post-2014 presidential elections, peaceful transfers of power occurred, and all political parties came together in response to the Russian invasion on February 24. In Afghanistan, all presidential elections after 2004 were disputed, leading to an extra-constitutional National Unity Government in 2014 and competing presidential “inaugurations” after the 2019 election. Even when it was abundantly clear that most or all U.S. troops would be leaving and their combat support to ANDSF was ending, Afghan politicians continued their internecine disputes and did not come together against the Taliban threat.

Wishful Thinking Versus Realism

There was wishful thinking on Afghanistan versus realism, even pessimism, regarding Ukraine. U.S. assessments of ANDSF’s capabilities tended to be excessively rosy, whereas assessments of Ukraine’s ability to resist a full-scale Russian military onslaught were conservative and turned out to be overly pessimistic. Domestically, there seemed to be a remarkable degree of (at least outward) complacency among Afghan non-Taliban political elites that the U.S. troop presence would continue, even in the face of the increasingly clearly expressed U.S. intention to withdraw militarily. While Ukrainian leaders and political elites expressed the hope that Russia would not attack — which may have reflected wishful thinking — this did not inhibit an effective national response to the invasion when it happened.

U.S. troops’ Afghan exit strategy gave rise to distortions, but this was not an issue in Ukraine. The perceived viability, effectiveness and sustainability of the ANDSF were seen as key to the exit of U.S. and other NATO troops from the country. This generated pressure to “show progress” in the development and capabilities of the ANDSF, even if it was not really there, or was not tested in combat. The absence of U.S. combat troops in Ukraine obviated the need for optimistic assessments to justify an exit strategy.

Unlike the mixed messaging on Afghanistan from different U.S. agencies, there was more unified, consistent messaging on Ukraine. In recent years, there were firm top-level political declarations that the United States would be completing the drawdown of its troops in Afghanistan, but also indications of a tug-of-war with the Pentagon, which did not particularly hide its desire for at least a small U.S. troop presence to stay on indefinitely. While not excusing Afghan complacency, this mixed messaging did provide some ammunition for wishful thinking on their part. There was no such semi-public disconnect in U.S. messaging to Ukraine as well as to Russia and more generally.

The United States and NATO had serious contingency plans and preparations for Ukraine but not for Afghanistan. In the case of Ukraine, there was a pre-invasion U.S. and NATO buildup on the country’s western borders and military aid was increased, and then a swift, multipronged response when the invasion occurred, including a sharp acceleration of military aid, large amounts of civilian aid and imposition of drastic sanctions against Russia. In Afghanistan, all eggs seem to have been put in the ANDSF “basket,” with little in the way of a “Plan B” against the Afghan collapse that materialized.

Shifting U.S. Priorities

The United States showed growing fatigue over Afghanistan, but this is not yet the case for Ukraine. The sheer longevity of the intervention in Afghanistan is what was surprising, not that fatigue eventually set in. The U.S. staying power over nearly two decades, though remarkable, was a symptom of the failure to set Afghanistan on a sustained course toward post-conflict stability, and during its second decade reflected inertia and the search for an exit. The key shortcoming was the lack of realistic preparations for the withdrawal of U.S. troops — forecast as early as 2011 and increasingly on the cards under the two most recent U.S. administrations. U.S. and European fatigue over Ukraine may set in at some point, but Ukraine’s resistance and the support provided by its Western partners has prevented an outright Russian victory.

Afghanistan became increasingly peripheral to U.S. national security interests, while Ukraine is more central. As time elapsed after 9/11 — especially after the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan nearly a decade later — the original CT justification for the U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan weakened and looked increasingly out of line with its huge size and cost. Ukraine’s location in Europe and Russia’s 2014 incursion enhanced Ukraine’s centrality to U.S. national security interests. Russia’s full-scale invasion has the potential to destroy the rules-based international order in Europe, which depends on respect for countries’ sovereignty and territorial integrity. An independent, sovereign Ukraine, therefore, has become central to broader U.S. and global security. Afghanistan, in contrast, was a high-priority focus of U.S. national security policy — until it was not.

Why Have the Wars in Afghanistan and Ukraine Played Out So Differently?
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Isolated Afghanistan may face struggle for aid after earthquake

June 23, 2022

Diplomatic editor
The Guardian
Wed 22 Jun 2022 12.45 EDT

Analysis: humanitarian appeals for Taliban-ruled country have had poor responses and there are sanctions complications

 

As Afghanistan reels from a powerful earthquake and starts to bury its more than 1,000 dead, the Taliban leadership in Kabul have appealed to the international community to clear any barriers created by sanctions and come to their aid.

“The government is working within its capabilities,” tweeted Anas Haqqani, a senior Taliban official. “We hope that the International Community & aid agencies will also help our people in this dire situation.”

On the basis that most of the urgent relief work can be classified as humanitarian as opposed to development aid, countries should be able to argue the assistance is permitted under US treasury sanctions waivers. Although there are grey lines between the two forms of aid, money to respond to an earthquake falls clearly under humanitarian work, and the UN relief agency OCHA was immediately coordinating a response in liaison with aid agencies.

But humanitarian aid appeals for Afghanistan have had poor responses this year despite drought and a collapse of the economy, and without replenishment the crisis will put further strains on funds. The number of aid agencies operating in the country has fallen, as has access through the international airport.

The International Rescue Committee – probably the largest remaining agency, with as many staff as the UN or even more – said it was deploying mobile health teams and working with authorities to provide support and cash assistance. The Italian medical aid group Emergency said it had sent seven ambulances and staff to the areas closest to the quake zone.

The Geneva-based International Federation of Red Cross said its disaster teams were on the way to Afghanistan and money would be released from its disaster relief emergency funds. In addition to the cash assistance, the Afghan Red Cross said it was sending 4,000 blankets, 800 tents and tarpaulins, 1,500 washing containers and hundreds of mattresses, pillows, blankets and cooking utensils.

Ambulances were heading to Logar, Khost, Paktika and Paktia provinces, but in the short term the issue is access to the earthquake-devastated areas, which are in one of the country’s most inaccessible regions. The rudimentary Kabul international airport will be put to the test. Flights operate regularly in and out of the airport but security has proved a problem.

Iran, Germany and the EU were among the countries and institutions coming forward with offers of help. But that does not mean there will not be complications under sanctions law, since aid agencies have been excessively risk-averse in sending cash to Afghanistan if it could be deemed likely to touch Taliban-linked accounts.

The episode may serve to remind the international community how badly underfunded the general aid effort is in Afghanistan. Overall, the diplomatic trajectory remains not to recognise the Taliban, largely owing to their discrimination against women.

This week the UN banned two Afghan education ministers from travelling abroad for any peace and stability talks, after its security council removed them from a sanctions exemption list. The UN agreed that 13 officials could remain on the exemptions list for another three months, unless after two months a UN member objects to the extension.

The Taliban backtracked in March on their pledge to lift a ban on girls attending high school, saying they would remain closed until a plan was drawn up in accordance with Islamic law for them to reopen. The decision has left the Taliban deprived of access to its overseas assets and to much World Bank funding. The previous regime was dependent on overseas aid.

Isolated Afghanistan may face struggle for aid after earthquake
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THE FIGHT FOR AFGHANISTAN RAGES ON

June 22, 2022

BY ADNAN NASSER 

Diplomatic Courier

17 June 2022.

Despite the rapid fall of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan, resistance to Taliban rule has continued. This has come from both armed and unarmed actors in the country writes Adnan Nasser.

The Taliban have returned to power in Kabul. Following U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to end America’s longest war, the U.S.-backed Ashraf Ghani’s government collapsed rapidly. The world was shocked to see the western trained and supplied Afghan army capitulate without a serious fight. Without U.S. support, provinces and cities fell to a blitzkrieg-like advance from Taliban forces—in some cases without a shot being fired. This quickly destroyed the hopes of the Biden administration that there would be a long war in which both sides would be forced to negotiate a political solution. Now a united democratic form of government in Afghanistan seems unlikely. For some however, resistance to the Taliban—both through armed and unarmed actions—continues.

In the mountainous region of the Panjshir valley, there is an organized movement made up of remnants of the old Northern Alliance—those who fought Taliban rule before the U.S. invasion—and soldiers of the former Afghan army that refused to surrender to the Taliban. The group is known as the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan (NRF) or the Second Resistance. The NRF claims the Panjshir valley’s capital—Barzarak—did not fall to the Islamists. However, the Taliban reject this claim, saying the stronghold was “completely conquered” after two weeks of intense combat. A NRF spokesman, Ali Nazary, responded that, “The resistance is still all over the valley.”

The NRF is being led by Ahmed Maasoud, the son of the legendary Ahmad Shah Massoud who led the Northern Alliance against the Taliban until his assassination at the hands of Al-Qaeda suicide operatives in September 2001. The young guerrilla leader said he was ready to follow his father’s footsteps by promising to help assemble a new resistance movement to liberate Afghanistan from the Taliban. While the NRF have not been able to mount a serious counter-offensive, they have managed to hold the line against the Taliban in the Panjshir valley.

However, the NRF are not the only ones who are actively struggling against Taliban rule. Ordinary Afghan civilians are resisting as well, particularly the most vulnerable of them—women. Many women recall life under the first Taliban reign (1996-2001) and do not wish to surrender the gains that have been made. They can already feel the encroachment on their rights and freedoms as the Taliban impose a strict draconian way of life on them, justifying it in the name of Islam.

In March, the Taliban reneged on an earlier promise to keep girls’ secondary schools open. Female students enrolled in secondary schools were sent home and instructed to await further notice—meaning that education for teenage girls and women has essentially been eliminated. A Taliban spokesman Inamullah Samangani, confirmed that the order to close girls’ schools was carried out. At the time, the Ministry of Education announced schools would remain closed until a system in accordance with “Islamic law and Afghan culture” was established. Thousands of teenage girls were heartbroken to be barred from pursuing their education and are now unsure of their own futures.

Likewise, in May, the Taliban’s Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue passed a decree forcing women to wear full head-to-toe burqas. The decree included punishment for male members of families that do not enforce the order, including three days in jail. These new edicts go against the Taliban’s promises to the international community to respect the rights of women after they regained control.

Some are prepared to take on the risk of defying the Taliban. In a demonstration last year, one woman marched with her brother saying she was not afraid as it was better that they kill her once than die gradually. Likewise, shortly after the Taliban returned to power, hundreds of women marched across northern and central Afghanistan in an impressive social media campaign—defiant in the face of Taliban’s attempts to control their fates, women held guns in the air and chanted anti-Taliban slogans.

But brave demonstrations and pockets of rebel activity will not be enough to stop the Taliban’s hold on Afghanistan. Despite being unable to rid the country of the Taliban, resistance to Taliban rule is likely to continue—just as it did when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. So long as the Taliban continue to repress their population, there will always be resistance to their rule and individuals will raise their voices even at the risk of facing the consequences. Dissent—both armed and unarmed—will continue in the face of Taliban rule.

:
Adnan Nasser is a Diplomatic Courier Correspondent and an analyst focused on the Middle East. He has a BA in International Relations from Florida International University.
THE FIGHT FOR AFGHANISTAN RAGES ON
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Policing Public Morality: Debates on promoting virtue and preventing vice in the Taleban’s second Emirate

June 18, 2022

Sabawoon Samim

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The Taleban’s ‘religious police’ are back in force, leaving many Afghans fearing a return to the notorious brutalities of the Taleban’s 1990s Amr bil-Maruf ministry. Yet, two decades on, argues guest author Sabawoon Samim* (with input from Roxanna Shapour), Taleban views on the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice have evolved, as has Afghan society. While the Taleban still believe it is an Islamic state’s duty to actively police public morality, he also traces the emergence of a new generation of Taleban leaders, some of whom are less conservative, and asks whether they may take a softer approach to policing public morality than their predecessors.
As when they were first in power, in 1996-2001, ‘promoting virtue and preventing vice’ has emerged as a top priority for the new Taleban administration. In their view, it is one of the requirements of an Islamic system of government. The Taleban re-established the Ministry of Dawat wa Ershad Amr bil-Maruf wa Nahi al-Munkar or Invitation and Guidance on Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice – often referred to by the shorthand ‘Vice and Virtue’ or ‘Amr bil-Maruf’ – when they announced the first appointments to their post-takeover cabinet on 12 September. In the same announcement, they abolished the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. Its building was turned over to Vice and Virtue (see here). The move raised questions as to whether, despite the many changes in Afghan society since the 1990s, the Taleban intended to return to the unforgiving social policies of their first period in government when they banned women from leaving the house without a close male relative and without wearing a burqa, outlawed activities such as playing music and watching TV and imposed harsh punishments for those violating their code, including public beatings.

Drawing on 45 interviews with Taleban officials, fighters, tribal elders, teachers and others in five provinces, plus the capital, Kabul, conducted before and after the Taleban captured power [1] this report looks at Amr bil-Maruf in the two Taleban administrations twenty years apart. It considers the religious injunction that Muslims should hold each other accountable by promoting virtue and discouraging vice. We take a look at what was problematic about Amr bil-Maruf in the Taleban’s first Emirate and how it changed during the insurgency. We relay ideas generally among the Taleban about what policing public morality should involve and at the re-established Amr bil-Maruf ministry – at how and why it has differed, so far, from the 1990s. In particular, the author looks at what sets at least some members of the new generation of Taleban leaders apart from their predecessors, and at how this might influence the Taleban’s approach to policy and practice when it comes to policing public morality.

What is the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice?

Amr bil-maruf wa nahi an il-munkar[2] is one of the tenants of Islam under sharia law, both Sunni and Shia, and is rooted in the Islamic principle of hisbah (accountability), which makes it incumbent for the umma (community of Muslims) to ensure public law and order and preserve community morals by taking steps to enjoin people to do what is good (maruf) and forbidding people from doing what is reprehensible (munkar).[3] One of the aims of such actions in promoting order is to protect Muslims from fitna, social disorder or chaos, which can itself facilitate sin. ‘Fitna’ has many meanings within Islamic thought, but in the context of Amr bil-Maruf, interviewees used it to describe how the normalisation of munkar in a Muslim society would lead to fitna, to social disorder and sin.

For the most part, the Taleban interviewed for this report insisted that it is not enough for people themselves to observe the rules of sharia in their daily lives; Muslims are also obliged to look the part of good Muslims by ensuring that their outward appearance adheres to Islamic conventions of attire and grooming. While nearly all Muslims believe amr bil-maruf to be an obligation that helps keep the faithful on the straight and narrow, there have been centuries-old debates among Islamic scholars over the proper mechanisms for its enforcement and to what extent it should be allowed to infringe on the privacy of community members. Just a few Muslim countries have formalised amr bil-maruf as a state institution to police the lives and behaviour of their citizenry, notably Iran and Saudi Arabia (with sharply curtailed powers since 2016).[4]

Importantly, it was not the Taleban who first formalised amr bil-maruf as a state institution in Afghanistan. According to the Ministry of Justice’s official website, the Directorate of Ihtisab (accountability), also known as Amr bil-Maruf, was first introduced by King Nader Khan, in 1929, and formalised in 1930. It was only later, during the tenure of Zahir Shah, Nadir’s son, that the directorate, now made up of 20 ulema, began to work within the framework of the Supreme Court (see here).[5]

Later, the mujahedin government of Burhanuddin Rabbani (1992-1996) established a Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice to regulate people’s behaviour and outward appearance per their interpretation of sharia (see here). It was this ministry that was retained and expanded by the Taleban when they captured Kabul and announced their Emirate in 1996.

How Amr bil-Maruf emerged during the first Emirate

The first generation of Taleban leaders were predominantly traditional mullahs and veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War, with a largely illiterate rank and file. Most, if not all, had grown up in Afghanistan’s rural south and received basic religious tuition in their home regions. The relative isolation of their upbringings meant they were unfamiliar with other cultures and religious practices, even within Afghanistan. They took the narrow and traditional interpretation of Islam ubiquitous in the villages where they lived and the hujras (community-level religious schools) and few madrasas in which they had studied, to be the norm for God-fearing Muslims. It was not only adherence to their understanding of sharia law that drove the first Emirate’s outlook on vice and virtue, but also culture shock. In newly-captured cities, the Taleban encountered activities that, while perfectly normal in those urban areas were wholly alien to the Taleban’s rural experience and the cultural norms of the southern Pashtun village they had grown up with. It was against this backdrop that the first Emirate’s Ministry for the Promotion of Vice and Prevention of Virtue, a remnant of the previous mujaheddin government, was retained and transformed into one of the most important state institutions by the Taleban.

The Taleban’s ‘morality police’ were used to rigorously and often violently enforce laws which banned or made obligatory certain behaviour and dress. Men had to grow beards and wear the baggy trousers and long shirts known as piran wa tonban, while women could only go outside wearing face-covering burqas. Men might be forced to attend public prayer in mosques, if for example, they were outside at the time or were shopkeepers. Many everyday activities were banned, such as family picnics, playing music, watching television, and publishing or possessing photographs of people or animals.[6]

Women, in particular, suffered under the Taleban’s severe restrictions. Adult women were forbidden to leave the house without a mahram (close male relative) and banned from working outside the home, except in the health sector (see details in this 2001 US State Department report), while girls were banned from education. Vice and Virtue was empowered to inflict on-the-spot punishments, including beatings, lashings, and detention. Several interviewees who lived through those days, such as this shopkeeper in Kabul, told AAN that public beatings and other punishments were their enduring memory of the feared ‘morality police’ (see for example here):

They beat people in front of a crowd when they thought someone hadn’t performed his prayer or had trimmed his beard…. When a woman was not wearing proper clothes and didn’t wear a burqa, they beat her mahram severely because they could not beat the woman herself.

Many women also remember being beaten themselves, as a 1999 United Nations report on the situation of women and girls in Afghanistan documented.

These rules were not derived from scholarly readings of sharia law. Indeed, the first Emirate had no well-drafted body of literature to inform policy and practice. For the most part, they were based on the orders of individual Taleban leaders, most notably, the movement’s founder, Mullah Omar. Most of these men, including Mullah Omar, had not completed their religious studies, apart from local and largely informal hujra studies.[7] Personal preferences also played a major role, as did the general norms and traditions of the areas where they had grown up and lived, ie Pashtun villages in the south. All of this informed an individual Taleban leader’s definition of a sharia-based life and, thus, his conception of proper behaviour. As a Taleban commander put it: “In those days, everyone acted as Amr bil-Maruf [and ordered] what he thought was fair or good.”

For the Taleban, Amr bil-Maruf was not just about enforcing what they considered to be Islamic behaviour and dress on the population. The ministry was also a powerful tool to control other Afghans, especially those living in cities, to keep them fearful and obedient. Outward conformity demonstrated the power of the Taleban state.

After 2001, the Vice and Virtue ministry closed and its officials disappeared from Afghanistan’s city streets. Given how many Afghans embraced watching television, listening to music, more relaxed dress codes, girls going to school and some women working pointed to the shallow-rootedness of what had been compulsory, while full mosques suggested that people’s faith carried on regardless. Amr bil-Maruf itself did not entirely disappear, but lived on as a relatively powerless directorate under the Ministry of Hajj and Religious Affairs (see here).

Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice policy during the insurgency

In the early years of the insurgency, the Taleban were loosely organised and overwhelmed with fighting the enemy. They established a shadow government only after they had gained significant territory, governing areas under their control via commissions, such as for health and education. While some of these commissions were established early on, the Amr bil-Maruf commission only started its work around 2016-17, after the Taleban had strengthened their grip on rural areas and following Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada’s rise to the leadership. A traditionalist mullah from Panjwayi district of Kandahar Province with a background as a judge, rather than military commander, Hibatullah sought to police moral behaviour immediately after taking over the movement, ordering the establishment of an Amr-bil Maruf commission. However, even then, provincial and district-level branches of Amr bil-Maruf were mostly active in the areas where the Taleban had full territorial control and a robust and unchallenged presence.

For the most part, in areas where Taleban control was fragile and under threat, an organised Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice commission was not established. According to one Taleban interviewee, where control was “weak,” combat-related priorities and strengthening their presence took precedence over running an organised vice and virtue commission. For example, in Badakhshan, there was an active vice and virtue commission in Yawan district where the Taleban had a strong and unchallenged presence, but in Tishkan, where the Taleban frequently fought against the Afghan National Army, Amr-bil Maruf did not exist.

During this period, the commission’s activities varied significantly from region to region. In some areas, the Taleban appointed civilian officials, or more rarely, military commanders as directors for district and provincial branches of the commission. For example, in Andar district in Ghazni province, a former Taleban judge was appointed as the commission’s district director. The director and other Taleban members were helped by the military commanders whenever necessary. In other areas, the Taleban hired sympathetic local mullahs for the role. These mullahs tended to work through sermons, advising and threatening individuals whom they viewed as violators of sharia. For example, in Zabul, mullahs affiliated with the Taleban preached about virtue in mosques and other public gatherings and ceremonies, such as weddings and funerals, and reported acts of vice to the military wing, which helped enforce the rules when called upon to do so.

Elsewhere, in the absence of an active commission, rank-and-file fighters and commanders took on the responsibility, occasionally announcing decrees, and policing people’s lives, for example checking phones and harassing young men about their hairstyles. According to several residents of Raghestan district in Badakhshan, for instance, young men ran the risk of being harassed and even beaten by local commanders for activities such as playing music and, less often, shaving their beards.

While the application of amr bil-maruf varied, district to district, during the insurgency, one thing remained consistent with the Taleban policy during the first Emirate – there were no official policies or precise guidelines. The lack of cohesive, movement-wide policies and guidelines meant that the fate of violators was determined, locally, either by Amr bil-Maruf or directly by local commanders, in cooperation with the local ulama and often with some variation in line with local sensibilities.

For the most part, in this period, the Taleban used ‘soft’ approaches, such as preaching, advising in private, and only to a lesser degree, threats and punishments. One Zabul resident recalled:

In our area, the local ulema, by order of the Taleban, went to mosques, bazaars and ceremonies [ie weddings, funerals etc] to preach about Islamic sharia. They also spoke personally to individual wrongdoers, such as those who listened to music. And if specific individuals repeated their wrongdoings, they threatened them and sometimes beat them.

For example, a 35-year-old shopkeeper in Zabul province said that if the Taleban found “anti-sharia content[on someone’s phone], they would either delete it or take the phone from him and tell his parents about it. We also heard about a few cases when they beat youths after frequent violations.” A farmer in his early 40s from Farah province also said:

[The Taleban] always stayed in the mosques. Sometimes they asked locals in a friendly way why they were not coming to the mosque. Sometimes they asked the youth what they had on their phones, and occasionally, they checked the phones of those who looked like they were doing something sinful. And sometimes they advised village elders to mind the behaviour of the youth [in the village]. They also did the same thing in the bazaars.

The absence of a unified policy meant that the personal attitude of individual Taleban commanders played a crucial role in shaping policy and approach at the local level. For example, in the eastern province of Kunar, where an Amr bil-Maruf commission did not operate, it was the attitudes of the local Taleban military that shaped the approach. Most commanders in that province turned a blind eye to things like trimming beards. One resident described their attitude as “dissatisfied, but not reproachful,” meaning that Taleban commanders in his area did not bother people for what they considered minor infractions. However, in southern Zabul province, some local commanders were hostile to violators. As one interviewee commented: “They just don’t like you if you’ve trimmed your beard because you are going against sharia.”

Consequently, many individual commanders banned certain activities such as playing music, and some games, including cricket, and directed other commanders to routinely infringe on people’s privacy, including checking their smartphones. There were harsh punishments for violating bans, for example, playing music at weddings and other ceremonies. In July 2020, when the author visited Andar district in Ghazni province and Muta Khan district in Paktika province, he found the Taleban had banned music in Andar and repeatedly warned the district’s residents that violators would be punished. Residents said the Taleban had beaten some young people for playing music inside their homes. Residents in Paktika’s Muta Khan said the Taleban had beaten men for egg-fighting (hagay jangawall) – a traditional game played during Eid, as described in this report,which the Taleban condemn for being a vehicle for gambling. In many instances, even in places where an Amr bil-Maruf commission existed, local commanders acted autonomously to punish people for engaging in activities they deemed immoral.

In general, during the insurgency, actions were highly localised and driven by conditions on the ground, with the military wing in the lead even where official Amr bil-Maruf commissions existed. In other words, the ulema and the official Amr bil-Maruf commission often took a back seat to local military commanders. The softer approach was partly due to a desire to garner, or at least not alienate, vital local support for the insurgency. However, said one Taleban respondent, it was also because we “did not have the responsibility to implement sharia in the society at a time when there is no full control and a complete Islamic system.”

In the second Emirate, different ideas about amr bil-maruf

Views of hisbah among Taleban are currently complex; there are no coherent or precise guidelines compiled for the movement and a range of views. A starting point is that most of our interviewees were critical of Amr bil-Maruf’s approach during the first Emirate, saying it had been unjust and unfair. For example, a Taleban fighter from Farah said:

In the previous Emirate, people were questioned and beaten even for something that was ‘mustahab’ [recommended, but not compulsory]. [Not carrying out] a mustahab action isn’t a sin, so one can hardly beat someone for not carrying it out .

The Taleban we spoke to suggested that in the 1990s, those working in the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice had been unqualified: they did not know what was actually permitted by sharia and what was not, as a commander from Ghazni said:

If someone says I’ve performed my prayer, we aren’t going to beat him – because he might be telling the truth. Even if he didn’t perform his prayer, we don’t have the right to beat him. In the previous tahrik (movement), there were people in the Taleban who wanted to ruin our reputation by beating people without any question or authority. They were even forcing people to pray twice, and in sharia, when someone has prayed once, they couldn’t and shouldn’t be forced to pray a second time.

However, almost all the interviewees, of whatever rank, thought the opinions of their predecessors on vice and virtue, such as the ban on playing music, had been correct. Significantly, they also considered the promotion of virtue and prevention of evil to be an integral component of an Islamic system of governance. In this, the Emirate is at odds with most other Muslim states which have chosen not to set up state bodies to promote virtue and prevent vice. However, the Taleban could be said to be part of a broader Afghan tradition of having such state agencies going back to Nader Shah. Where our interviewees differed was on enforcement. They generally fell into two distinct trends of thought.

The first trend suggested that some acts, as a Taleban-affiliated scholar from Zabul described them, are “only a minor wrongdoing by an individual and do not affect society.… [These] are [an individual’s] own responsibility and as rulers and fellow Muslims we should only advise him.” Within this group, however, any consensus on which acts are minor violations and which are “harmful to society” appears elusive. When asked to enumerate which acts constitute minor infractions, some interviewees said trimming beards was a personal matter and a minor sin that should be addressed by instructing or informing the individual. Others, however, disagreed, saying that shaving beards should be prohibited by force, as one Taleban commander explained:

Having a beard is Sunna [following the example or words of the Prophet Muhammad]. Some ulema even say it’s wajib [compulsory, according to Islam]. So if someone who lives in a Muslim society and interacts with fellow Muslims goes against Sunna, he also encourages others to violate it. That’s why a strict ban on shaving beards should be enforced.

Differences of views were also evident when it came to music. Almost all Taleban encountered by this author believe that listening to and playing music is haram, forbidden by Islam, with the exception of acapella devotionals that do not have complex harmony or instrumental accompaniment and tarana (Pashto chants) praising the Taleban.[8] However, the Taleban’s approach to dealing with violators varies vastly. While some of the Taleban interviewed by AAN said that most forms of music should be banned and every violator punished, others suggested that not everyone who hears music should be punished. A mid-level Taleban official working in one of the civilian ministries said:

Listening to music is a major sin. There are enough hadiths to explain the prohibition on music in sharia. But you don’t have the right, under sharia, to beat someone who listens to it in his own car or his home as long as he doesn’t bother or encourage others to do so. It means that if only he himself listens to it, only advising him is enough from a sharia point of view. But if he bothers others [by the music] or encourages others to listen, then you must do something to stop him.

In contrast, a second trend in thinking among our interviewees argued that all actions and behaviour deemed to violate sharia should be eradicated in an Islamic society. The interviewees falling into the second group were resolute in their belief that adherence to sharia law was an absolute, and should be strictly enforced under an Islamic system of governance. Without strictly imposing the rules of sharia law, one commander said, “You can’t ensure that people follow sharia in these evil times.” Another interviewee said:

It’s the responsibility of the Islamic system to bring order to an Islamic society. If people accept sharia and go on that way, there is no problem. But not going on the path of sharia creates fitna in society. Therefore, any act that is against sharia should be banned in whatever way possible. Otherwise, you can’t bring order to society, nor implement sharia.

While they supported an authoritarian and vigorous ban on particular issues, most interviewees following this second trend in thinking still disagreed with the general approach of their predecessors in the 1990s. Interviewees’ support for the use of force to implement amr bil-maruf only extended to specific issues. For example, they opposed said one Taleban commander from Kunar province “beating people for not wearing a turban.” A Taleban district level official in Badakhshan province explained:

If someone is living under an Islamic system, they must know every single rule of Islam and should obey them. For example, they shouldn’t trim their beards, shouldn’t listen to music, shouldn’t gamble, women should wear hijab and only leave home when necessary. If someone does not obey these rules, it is the responsibility of the Emirate to make people obey them either through financial fines or other punishments.

Some interviewees, especially those from the second school of thought, suggested that enforcement should be hardened gradually. For example, a mid-level Taleban official in the provincial Department of Education in his 30s from Ghazni province:

In sharia, some bans came gradually, not swiftly in one order. For example, the ban on wine during the time of the Prophet Muhammad came in three phases. First, it was in the form of advising that drinking wine isn’t good, then a second order came a little later which forbad it during prayer times and the final and complete ban came in the third order. So, some issues that are major sins and damaging [to society] could be dealt with in this way.

Many from this second group argued that an Islamic system “should first only tell someone about a particular sin, then a few months or days later if they repeat it, you should threaten them and finally, if a rule is repeatedly violated, it must be banned by force.”

How the differing views on Amr bil-Maruf translate into policy

The re-founded Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice is fast emerging as one of the dominant state institutions in the second Islamic Emirate. Its acting minister is Sheikh Muhammad Khalid Hanafi, who is from the eastern province of Nuristan and said to be a well-educated teacher of hadith. Hanafi joined the Taleban after 2001, and rose quickly, working in the Taleban’s judiciary during the insurgency. According to a department director at the ministry, policy will not be based on the arbitrary orders of individuals, but will be in line with sharia law and deliberated by the Taleban’s own ulema. Hanafi himself is among the less conservative Taleban, following the first trend in thinking described above. However, sources at the ministry said that within ministry ranks, there is a variety of ulema, including the more conservative and hardline when it comes to enforcement. Several ministry staffers suggested to AAN that Hanafi’s aim is to fashion a ministry staffed by individuals well-trained in sharia who will bring Afghanistan’s community of Muslims to live the ideal Islamic life by advising or gentle cajoling, at least for now. One symbol of that is that the new generation of Amr bil-Maruf enforcers of sharia wear white piran wa tonban and sometimes also white lab coats and drive white vehicles. A softer approach may also be taken on pragmatic grounds. For example, one ministry official said: “For two decades, the West invested in directing Afghans towards infidelity in the name of modernisation. So we need even more time and wisdom, not beatings, to return people to the Islamic way of life.”

The ministry is made up of three directorates: the directorate of muhtasebin (implementing hisbah) has ten staff stationed in each police district to promote virtue and prevent vice by providing advice to individuals at checkpoints, ceremonies, shops and other public places. Multiple sources inside the government told AAN that the ministry has started holding short courses on vice and virtue for civil servants. A second directorate provides ‘amnesty’ or ‘pardon’ cards (in Pashto, da a’fwi kartona, and in Dari, kart-e afu) to officials of the former regime and is tasked with ensuring their safety. Finally, according to ministry sources, the dawat wa ershad directorate is a replica of Amr bil-Maruf for the Taleban themselves, monitoring and keeping track of their own ranks in vice and virtue-related cases. It is also apparently a military unit charged with addressing complaints filed against Taleban members (see also here).

Some of those Taleban wanting to have a very different Amr bil-Maruf from the first Emirate’s have had their ideas transformed by their experience in exile. Those from the political wing of the Taleban who have been living in Qatar have developed less rigid views on promoting virtue and preventing vice, partly through exposure to a different, but still pious, Muslim society, and partly through a more scholarly education (more on this below). According to one well-informed source with strong connections to senior members of the Taleban, and an active second-tier job inside the Emirate, many senior leaders from this wing, as well as younger Taleban who have also lived in Qatar and Pakistan, have “very moderate and even open-minded views.” A Taleban official who heads up the communications and media team at a line ministry told AAN: “Many of them don’t care whether you have trimmed your beard or not, or whether you wear a turban or a cap.” These Taleban believe that the focus should be on building a strong government that is not isolated from the world and that concentrates on economic and political priorities rather than the heavy-handed and controversial enforcement of amr bil-maruf.

However, according to a source close to the leadership, the Taleban’s supreme leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, along with his close circle, are unhappy with “the current moderate policy” of the ministry and “want sharia to be implemented at full-scale.” According to the same source, Taleban ministers and other leaders in Kabul are trying to convince the supreme leader to temper his position in some cases, but have so far not succeeded. Rather, he and his close circle of advisers would like to see the clock turned back, to some degree, to the 1990s and are not prepared to change policies or forgo their traditionalist interpretation of sharia in favour of gaining either national and international legitimacy. According to one Taleban source, “He wants to move on the path of loy mullah sahib [Mullah Omar] and implement sharia the same way.” Other Taleban, though, as we have seen believe differently.

Diverging views became apparent, for example, after the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, on 28 March, ordered all male government employees to wear a cap and grow beards (Reuters report, here). According to a source close to the leadership, the decision came directly from the Amir and the ministry had no role in the decision. After it was announced, some Taleban officials publicly criticised it on social media, revealing contrasting ideological positions within the movement. For example, in a 28 March tweet, a member of the Taleban’s cultural commission, Asad Barai, tweeted: “Could Amr bil-Maruf employees bring a single case from the history of Islam where those who have trimmed their beards [have been] punished? … [These are] attempts at defaming the government.” A mid-ranking security official who was unhappy with the decision told AAN:

The leadership should move carefully and with wisdom, and understand the priorities of both sharia and the people. Sharia isn’t only confined to growing a beard, nor are there solid justifications for forcing people to grow beards.

In a tweet which has since been deleted, the head of the Administrative Office of the Emirate’s media team, Qari Abdul Sattar Said, who is a prominent and respected intellectual among the younger generation of Taleban, said: “In the history of Islam, there are almost no instances when a Muslim has been beaten, detained or punished for trimming his beard or [for having a particular] hairstyle.” Interestingly, following immense criticism of the decree by individual Taleban themselves both on social media and in private discussions, enforcement of it dwindled. A similar battle, although not involving Amr bi Maruf per se, on what is permissible appeared to have taken place behind the scenes concerning older girls’ education.[9]

Revealing the distance even of ‘moderates’ within Amr bil-Maruf from the view of many Afghans as to what their religion deems to be proper was another ruling on dress, announced on 7 May 2022. Women, the order said, should cover their faces in public, preferably by wearing a burqa – the better option – or  loose, black clothing (probably a reference to the Gulf Arab-style abaya) with a shawl and a niqab. Best of all, the order said, is not to leave home at all unless necessary (see AAN’s analysis here). The order was drafted and signed by a senior-level commission headed by Hanafi and including the ministers of education, justice and hajj and awqaf. Unlike the order on male government workers wearing caps and growing beards, the order on women’s dress did not trigger widespread criticism within the Taleban and indeed was generally welcomed. Most Taleban find it acceptable that women should cover their faces in public. Even those who say a reading of sharia reveals no obligation for women to cover their faces may support it as the best option in what one interviewee called “this evil time.” ‘Moderates’ may also consider the current order a step forward from the 1990s when women were only allowed to wear burqas, especially as it seems the ultra-conservatives among the Taleban would have preferred a burqa-only policy.

Nationwide, the Taleban’s approach to amr bil-maruf, has so far, been similar to the highly-variable approach taken during the insurgency, when local sentiment and especially commanders’ preferences dominated. This is to be expected given the lack of a fully operational, nationwide vice and virtue infrastructure or a precise compliance and enforcement policy. A mid-level official in the ministry told the author during an interview in late April that the ministry had started appointing district-level officials only recently and staffingwas still incomplete, with some districts and even provinces still having no director or other staff. In many provinces, Taleban military commanders and other officials were still intervening in matters of behaviour and dress. In Helmand, for instance, the Taleban provincial director of vice and virtue, according to a local resident, “threatened youths that they had to grow beards and thereby align themselves with the Islamic and Afghan way of appearance.” However, in Andar district of Ghazni province, where most forms of music had been banned, including the traditional drum duhool. The duhool is now permitted, but only after the Taleban district governor and police chief were changed. This was also the case with egg-fighting in Paktika’s Muta Khan district. When the author visited the district during the last Eid, in early May 2022, egg-fighting was permitted by the provincial authorities. In general, during the nine-month Taleban rule, the approach to amr bil-maruf has been softer than it was during the insurgency. The mid-level official in the ministry interviewed in April said that “We [the vice and virtue ministry] lack personal and mujahedin [religious police] to enforce the bans.”

Some variation in enforcement can be laid at the door of individual beliefs within the Taleban, with regional norms continuing to play a significant role in attitudes. Society in southern Afghanistan, for instance, embroiled in intense fighting and famous for its conservatism, has seen much less change when it comes to social norms in the last two decades, and neither have its Taleban. Those from eastern, southeastern, central and northern Afghanistan today demonstrate a greater degree of acceptance where norms have changed locally. To give one example: in Kandahar, according to media reports, the Taleban closed a local radio station and detained its three employees for music on air (See here and here), while in Khost province, according to multiple residents, the local FM radio channel continues to play music.

Change has come in how amr bil-maruf is implemented now compared to during the insurgency in the make-up of areas that the Taleban control. Pre-August 2021, they only controlled some rural areas where behaviour and dress tends to conform more to their expectations of what is required of a good Muslim. Now, the Taleban are again in charge of cities and as during the first Emirate, Amr bil-Maruf activities are chiefly focused on urban centres, particularly Kabul. Many Taleban believe city dwellers are Westernised and fail to follow correct behaviour for good Muslims. Amr bil-Maruf, for its part, sees itself responsible for leading these urban dwellers on the road to a lifestyle in line with the Sunna of the Prophet.

Also important to note is that the street-level enforcers of amr bil-maruf are largely experienced and well-disciplined, rank-and-file fighters, who are largely illiterate and have no great depth of understanding of sharia. By virtue of their diverse backgrounds and exposure to the social freedoms during the 20 years of the Republic, however, even they are not as conservative as the Taleban of the 1990s. Moreover, they also do not enjoy the same power and autonomy as their predecessors in the first Emirate had, neither when it comes to enforcing amr bil-maruf, nor influencing policy.

Finally, Mullah Hibatullah is not the charismatic leader that Mullah Omar was. He could personally steer every action of the movement and give the final word to settle ambiguities or disputes. Along with the absence of a robust body of ideological literature means that crafting policy on amr bil-maruf is not straightforward. Rather, various factors jostle for prominence: the scholarly interpretation of sharia law, the sensibilities of discordant elements within the movement coloured by regional mores and their life experiences and the also varying expectations of the Afghan people.

To sum up, Taleban generally believe the state should enforce public morality, but most are critical of the violent approach taken by Amr bil-Maruf during the first Emirate. Some Taleban believe ‘minor’ infringements of sharia are an individual responsibility, although there is disagreement about what minor infractions are. Others believe the state must come down hard on any violation of sharia, although even then, the preference is for sharia to be enforced through ‘softer’ or graduated measures, rather than punishments at the first violation. While Taleban leader Mullah Hibatullah would like to see a more hardline approach and within the ministry, there is a variety of views, the minister tends towards the softer approach. The ministry is not yet fully up-and-running nationally. Many positions are as yet unfilled and there are no national guidelines. Policy and enforcement varies, as it did during the insurgency, but Amr bil-Maruf is stronger and more organised in the cities – as it was in the 1990s – where Taleban believe the need for getting the ‘Westernised’ urbanites back on the straight and narrow is most acute.

Exploring what has changed in both Afghan society and the Taleban in the last twenty years that underpins the Amr bil-Maruf that is now emerging, and the differences with its 1990s iteration is the subject of the final part of this report.

Changing society and changing Taleban

Afghan society has been transformed since the Taleban were last in power. Two decades of international engagement, as well as greater opportunities for education, better communications, for some years, at least a stronger economy, and mass migration to the cities have all driven rapid social change, particularly the urban areas. Under the Republic, individual liberties, press freedom and women’s roles in society, including their political participation, improved significantly. In the past two decades, Afghanistan achieved the highest literacy rate in its history. School education, not only for boys but also for girls, became a norm and a major demand in many parts of the country. By 2020, according to the World Bank, women accounted for 19 per cent of the country’s total paid workforce and the number of girls in secondary education had increased from seven per cent in 2004 to 40 per cent in 2020. According to the Ministry of Higher Education, 78,000 Afghan women sat the university entrance exam in 2013, up from 1,000 in 2003 (see here).

Importantly, these changes were not limited to urban areas; rural Afghanistan also transformed to a great extent and the gap between urban and rural narrowed, leaving the Taleban to govern an Afghan society with greater expectations from the state, such as for girls’ education and personal freedoms than when they were in power the first time around.

During the insurgency, the Taleban took control of territories where many activities that had been banned in the first Emirate had become common practice (more on this later). Many of the urban habits that seemed extraordinary to rural Afghans in the 1990s have become established norms even in the Taleban’s birthplace of the rural south, as well as activities which new technology has made possible. Music and mobile phone selfies, for instance, are commonplace pastimes even in remote regions. Afghan men trimmed their beards and sported ‘Western’ hairstyles. Families sent their daughters to school and some women were also taking up jobs outside the home. During the insurgency, Taleban commanders were relatively tolerant of such activities – they needed to keep residents on side – even though, in general, Taleban rule was authoritarian, strong on tax collection, ready to use violence and not brooking dissent. (For detail on this, see AAN Dossier: Living with the Taleban here).

Some of the changes within the Taleban, including the greater variety of opinions on amr bil-maruf stem from the much broader and more diverse base of officials and fighters it now has and reflect the general changes in Afghan society. While Mullah Hibatullah represents a continuity of view from the 1990s, in both his understanding of sharia and that, in many cases, it needs rigid enforcement by the state, more flexible interpretations of what amr bil-maruf demands come because of the life experiences and education of many Taleban in exile.

A great number of senior Taleban leaders have enjoyed life in cities, such as Doha in Qatar and Peshawar, Islamabad, and Karachi in Pakistan. This generation of Taleban leaders has availed itself of the trappings that modern life has to offer, such as the internet – they have proven particularly adept at using social media for propaganda purposes – and even sent both sons and daughters to schools (see AAN reporting here). That exposure to urban life, including outside Afghanistan in societies which are still Muslim and God-fearing, but different from Afghanistan’s rural south has helped drive a change in some attitudes. Also important, however, has been education.

Many Taleban cadres and leaders, and even scholars from the previous generation, are better versed in Hanafi jurisprudence than the Taleban leaders of the 1990s. Over the past two decades, the curriculum of the madrasas in Afghanistan and Pakistan where most Taleban study have expanded with newly-acquired books, allowing them to progress to advanced levels and develop a more nuanced understanding of sharia. Most senior leaders and other officials have attained advanced levels, such as mawlawi, mufti and sheikh ul-hadith,[10] as a Taleban official explained:

In the past, there were fewer chances for the ulema (Muslim scholars) to get an advanced education [in sharia] due to several problems such as a lack of madrasas, and qualified teachers, and fighting. The ulema didn’t have ready access in nearby areas or they couldn’t afford it. Therefore, they mostly studied a few books in local madrasas and mosques and became mullahs. But now there is everything, madrassas are everywhere, books are easily accessible and there are more [religious] teachers. In the past, the ulema also rarely wanted to take on the responsibility that came with a higher degree in Islamic studies such as [becoming a] mufti. It is a huge responsibility and people rarely dare to take it.

The Taleban have also had close interactions with other Islamic movements and ideologies – and not just al-Qaeda. As AAN’s 2017 thematic report on the Taleban ideology highlighted: “Whereas the movement had once banned books by Qaradawi and the Muslim Brotherhood, it now actively promoted works from these sources and regularly defended Islamist groups within the general context of anti-Imperialism.[11] However, there is little to no evidence that this exposure has led them to amend any part of their own broader interpretations of Islam, such as their continued rejection of democratic elections, something the Muslim Brotherhood formally espouses.

There has always been some tension among the Taleban between the demands of Islam and tribal culture (that tension was explored in Thomas Ruttig’s special report How Tribal Are the Taleban? and Gopal and strick van Linschosen’s report on Taleban ideology (see, for example, pages 26-27.) In the 1990s, Mullah Omar banned ‘baad’ marriages, when a girl is married into another family to resolve a blood feud, a tribal custom, which is not permitted by sharia.[12] However, it was quite rare for the Taleban’s rules of the 1990s, couched as Islamic, to break from the familiar Pashtun mores, where these were in conflict. Among the new generation of Taleban leaders, however, are scholars and ideologues who have had a more advanced madrassa education and scholarly understanding of Hanafi fiqh (jurisprudence). Their espousal of Islam is, in contrast to the 1990s, somewhat less coloured by tribal mores and more firmly rooted in a scholarly understanding of the Hanafi school of Sunni Islamic thought. In some instances, they are attempting to develop more scholarly and clearer definitions of what should be enjoined and what prevented and formulate sharia-based fatwas (religious edicts).

For instance, the author knows of several cases where the Taleban have intervened in disputes involving women’s issues, such as the right of a widow to marry a man of her own choosing or a woman’s inheritance rights. The Taleban’s supreme leader issued a decree on 3 December 2021 which banned forced marriages and insisted on a widow’s right to inherit and a woman’s right to choose her own husband (see the official decree here). A provincial Taleban judge in Ghazni province described the issue in an interview in November:

We solved more than three dozen critical issues in the past three months. In one case, a girl was being forced to marry one of her relatives. She didn’t want to. Before she was engaged to the relative, she [with the help of her brother] complained to us and we told their family that, from a sharia point of view, they can’t force her to marry someone she doesn’t like. We warned her father that he would be punished if he went ahead [with his plan].

The author has also tracked multiple instances of Taleban backing a woman’s Islamic right to inheritance after the woman approach them. For instance, in Farah province, a Taleban mid-level official told AAN that “when a woman approaches us and demands her portion of inheritance, we immediately resolve the issue in accordance with sharia.” This new generation of scholars and ideologues insist that fiqh trumps tribal attitudes, even in such sensitive family issues. This is to say, instead of ignoring such matters, some Taleban tend to solve them in accordance with sharia, at least for now.

Some interviewees gave examples of how Taleban views have changed since they were first in power, when it comes to the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice, including the following:

After taking control of Kabul in the 1990s, the Taleban banned women from any public space without an accompanying mahram (close male relative). Currently, however, the official rule is that women can leave the house without a mahram to travel a distance of up to 72km (45 miles) or for up to three days (it is not yet implemented), as a provincial official of Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice described:

Women can travel without a male relative for up to three days. It means they can go on a trip that lasts three days or, in today’s technology, they can travel by car to a destination almost 45 miles away. For a longer distance [such as travelling abroad], or for more than three days, they should have a mahram with them.

In the 1990s, the Taleban imposed one particular type of hijab, the burqa, but Taleban interviewees pointed out that prescribing a particular hijabis not mandated by sharia. According to one interviewee, “when a woman covers her face, her hands, and her body with whatever sort of hijab she wants, it is fine.” Another interviewee said: “covering the face with hijab isn’t ordered [in sharia], but in this evil time, if the face is covered, it is the best option for a woman.” Many Taleban interviewees suggested that covering the face is necessary in a time where “fitna is spread everywhere and for avoiding [more] fitna, women should cover their faces.”

The Taleban rigorously policed men’s beards during the first Emirate. Amr bil-Maruf would measure the length of a man’s beard, check to see if any of his facial hair had been trimmed and punish violators. However, Taleban respondents now argue that sharia provides specific rulings not only for trimming beards, but also for trimming moustaches. A Taleban member described it:

Growing a beard and trimming the moustache is Sunna in Islamic sharia and something our Prophet did all the time – it reaches the level of wajib (compulsory). Trimming your moustache is as important as not shaving your beard. So, he who calls himself a Muslim should obey all the obligations and follow the path of our Prophet. If someone shaves his beard and leaves his moustache to grow, he is in sin all the time, and he who doesn’t trim his beard, but fails to trim his moustache to the degree that the sharia calls for is also in sin.

During the first Emirate, the Taleban religious police forced men to pray publically and beat those who failed to do so. However, most Taleban we interviewed now see the issue differently, as one from Nangarhar province explained:

You should encourage people to pray, not force them, because the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice is a way of encouragement and wisdom. In many cases, you should only describe the wrong and the correct to someone. Forcing someone to pray is the wrong approach completely. If someone prays because they are afraid, it [their prayer] isn’t accepted by Allah. So, no one should force anyone to pray as it will not be accepted by Allah. If we force people to pray, who can ensure that they are reciting the words correctly? Have they done their ablutions? It is completely wrong. It’s prohibited by sharia and should not be repeated in the future.

The Taleban have also retreated from their earlier ban on images of living creatures, based on their understanding that they amounted to shirk, idolatry. In the 1990s, they banned all photos of living beings, and off the back of that television and video. During the insurgency, and in the light of the need for effective propaganda, Taleban ulema reassessed the decision and now believe these are allowed under sharia, as a Taleban commander explained:

Pictures and videos were banned in the first Emirate but are now allowed because we know their value. They’re very important and are a huge need nowadays. It’s also good for our cause, for Islam through which we can spread our message to the world. So we investigated, and most ulama agreed that it’s not considered a sin under sharia, given the need. So now the whole Emirate appreciates their value.

Given the Taleban belief that sharia should be followed, the fact that Amr bil-Maruf is not following up on all violations is an important question. For instance, the Taleban admit that all women should be given their inheritance, but are yet to generally enforce this. The same is true for girls getting an education: Taleban officials often posit, not only in public but also in private discussions, that education is a right for all (see for example here, here and here), but so far have failed to deliver it for all girls. They also consider trimming the moustache to a specific length to be the Sunna of the Prophet just like not shaving the beard, but in practice, only insist on men not trimming beards : is the moustache less important than the beard?

What might happen next?

The Taleban maintain the belief that it is the state’s duty to enjoin virtue and prevent vice among the population. Within the broader movement of the Taleban, there is an excessive sense of disdain for those they view as violating sharia law, but members of the movement have differing views of how this should be achieved and whether minor infractions of sharia should be policed. The evidence suggests that even today’s conservatives do not want to return to the violent and repressive enforcement of amr bil-maruf as seen in the 1990s. Yet even the softest of amr bil-maruf policies could not concede individual Afghans the freedom to make all their own choices on dress and behaviour, as some non-Taleban Afghans would like.

However, the Taleban, in government once again, face a population which has itself been transformed in the last twenty years, not everyone and not everywhere, but in general, considerably so. Many, probably most Afghans already consider themselves to be following sharia and the Sunna of the Prophet. So far, there has been little public protest against the Taleban’s enforcement of its interpretation of sharia, as enshrined in orders and decrees. The exception here are women’s rights activists who have courageously continued to demonstrate for the return of lost freedoms. Yet, there is uneasiness among population, amounting to, as yet, quietly-voiced dissent, especially over some issues – older girls’ education, rules on dress and women working. As AAN’s report on the Taleban’s order for women to cover their faces showed, there are many complexities in Afghan society, down to the family level, as to what is correct behaviour and dress for Muslims and whether the state has the right to dictate what many Afghans consider to be family matters. At the same time, as this report has shown, greater study of fiqh by some Taleban means a greater appetite among some to also get involved in matters such as women’s inheritance, and whether girls and widows have given their consent to marriages. Restricting women’s rights on dress, education, work and travel could go hand-in-hand with promoting them in other areas of the law. In so doing, they would be taking on, not just urban, but also rural interests, including generally supportive populations. (It would be similar to the ban on narcotic production and trade – which is clearly prohibited by sharia, but also crucial to the national economy and many people’s livelihoods.)

Behind all the discussion is the matter of the relative power of state versus society. Kabul in 2022 is not the half-destroyed city of 1996 when it was captured by the Taleban and they were able to impose on the demoralised population what many Kabulis considered to be the culture of the southern Pashtun village. And nationally, Afghanistan is a changed country with different expectations of the state. The Taleban and Amr bil-Maruf may have changed in terms of how they want to enforce particular behaviour and dress, but they still think it is right to impose their reading of sharia on other Afghans. After two decades of rule by the Republic, this represents a massive grab for power by the state – which may yet not go unopposed.

Edited by Kate Clark

References

References
↑1 Data for this research was derived from 45 interviews, three by phone and the rest face-to-face. 19 of the interviews were conducted between October and December 2020 in Badakhshan, Farah, Ghazni, Kunar and Zabul and were with individuals who had local awareness of the areas in which they were interviewed, including tribal elders, local Taleban officials, former officials and teachers with links to the Taleban, as well as local journalists and community members. An additional 26 interviews were conducted after the Taleban captured power nationally, from 15 August 2021 to April 2022, and were with Taleban ideologues, officials, fighters, commanders and senior officials, including three high-ranking) in Kabul and the provinces mentioned above.
↑2 In this report, we use ‘amr bil-maruf’ (small letters) to describe this concept and ‘Amr bil-Maruf’ (capital letters) for a ministry or other state body set up to enforce it.
↑3 The duty of Muslims to encourage good and discourage evil is mentioned several times in the Quran and the Hadith (a collection of texts containing sayings and accounts of daily practices (the Sunna) of the Prophet Muhammad) which in addition to the Quran make up the guiding principles for Muslims. For example:

Let there arise out of you a band of people inviting to all that is good, enjoining what is right, and forbidding what is wrong: they are the ones to attain felicity (Surah Al-Imran, Verse-104, Yusuf Ali translation).

It is the believers who repent, who are devoted to worship, who praise their Lord, who fast, who bow down and prostrate themselves, who encourage good and forbid evil, and who observe the limits set by Allah. And give good news to the believers. (Surah at-Taubah, verse 112, Dr Mustafa Khataab translation)

On the authority of Abu Sa’eed al-Khudree (ra) who said: I heard the Messenger of Allah (saw) say:

“Whosoever of you sees an evil, let him change it with his hand; and if he is not able to do so, then [let him change it] with his tongue; and if he is not able to do so, then with his heart — and that is the weakest of faith i

(Sahih Muslim, Hadith 34: Forbidding Evil with the Hands, Speech, and Heart).

Translations from Sunnah.com’s Forty Hadith of an-Nawawi.
↑4 This system also operates with varying degrees of authority in several other Islamic countries, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Malaysia (see here). The controversial enforcement tactics employed by some of these state entities have been implicated in violations of international human rights, particularly in Iran (see for example here) and Saudi Arabia, where in 2016 the government curtailed the state entity’s powers to reporting perceived violations rather than enforcement (see here). In Iran, attempts by activists and politicians, most recently in 2016 by then president Hassan Rouhani, to reign in the religious police have so far been unsuccessful.
↑5 See also Afghanistan in the Course of History, Ghulam Muhammad Ghobar, Second Volume, Dari, page 43.
↑6 Gopal and Strick van Linschoten explore why the Taleban were so rigid about monitoring and enforcing outward appearance. The rules “all have roots in pre-1979 village norms,” and to a particular thinking “that links outward behaviour to inward belief, and which regulates the act over the intent.” (p15) They argue that:

The distinction here between intent and act is not a trivial one, because for the Taleban it was precisely the latter that was the object of surveillance and discipline. Unlike in Islamism or Western liberalism, interior states were largely irrelevant under the Islamic Emirate; instead, the jurisdiction of Taleban discipline was the exterior state, the act—and the public spectacle of discipline was itself a performative act, a way (in the minds of the Taleban) of collectively reconstructing virtue for an entire society. (p26
↑7 See, for example, Anand Gopal and Alex Strick van Linschoten, Ideology in the Afghan Taliban, page 12 Afghanistan Analysts Network, 2017 here.
↑8 Taleban tarana – poems which praise their fighters – are, Fabrizio Foschini wrote in a November 2021 AAN report on music censorship, “grounded in melodies and texts deeply rooted in Pashtun folk culture, but unaccompanied by instruments. The absence of instruments is a major criterion for the perceived lawfulness of music…. These tarana became a major propaganda tool for the Taleban during their nearly two-decades-long insurgency, possibly one of central importance for winning the fight “for hearts and minds” of Pashtun youths in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. They had, however, already been composed and performed by the Taleban in the 1990s…. [T]he only other forms of musical performance endorsed by the Taleban are compositions in their praise or strictly devotional music, such as marsyeh (requiem) and na’t (a recitation in praise of the Prophet Muhammad)… [the] distinction seems to be largely between vocal and instrumental performances, rather than devotional versus secular, as the musical gatherings at the Sufi Chishti Khanaqah in Old Kabul, a devotional practice considered as ghaza-ye ruh (food for the soul) have all but stopped since the Taleban’s takeover. See also this 2012 paper on the songs of the Taleban.
↑9 The Ministry of Education organised the reopening of schools for just after Nawruz, but saw their plans countermanded on the day by an order from Kandahar – apparently prompted by ultra-conservative clerics advising the Supreme Leader – to keep the schools closed until a “comprehensive plan, in accordance with sharia and Afghan culture” could be developed. The abrupt change of policy appeared to have been prompted by concerns about dress and adolescent girls being outside the home en masse – see analysis and background in this AAN report. Girls education, however, is an area where policy could move on, given that support for older girls’ education can be found among many Taleban officials, including those working in the powerful intelligence and security ministries.
↑10 In Afghanistan, a mawlawi is a person who has studied hadith, tafsir (Quranic exegesis) and fiqh (jurisprudence) from a recognised madrassa such as the Dar ul-Ulum Deoband and holds a sanad, degree, or is an ijazat-e hadith, an authority on hadith. A mufti is the next highest-ranking Islamic scholar, one who has specialised in one field such as fiqh and is in a position to issue a fatwa (formal written ruling on a particular issue) and is most commonly is associated to a dar ul-ifta (house of fatwas). Sheikh is an honorific title used to refer to a person of respect, such as sheikh ul-hadith (teacher of hadith) or sheikh ul-Islam (Islamic scholar).
↑11 Gopal and Strick van Linschoten, Ideology in the Afghan Taleban, page 35, Afghanistan Analysts Network, 2017, here.
↑12 It was reported at the time, writes one of this report’s editors, that Mullah Omar was prompted by a touching storyline about the plight of one such girl in the popular BBC radio soap opera, New Home, New Life. See also this media report and AAN obituary).

REVISIONS:

This article was last updated on 15 Jun 2022

 

Policing Public Morality: Debates on promoting virtue and preventing vice in the Taleban’s second Emirate
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